http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/19388048

An efficient parallel garbage collection system and its correctness proof

An efficient system to perform garbage collection in parallel with list operations is proposed and its correctness is proven. The system consists of two independent processes sharing a common memory. One process is performed by the list processor (LP) for list processing and the other by the garbage collector (GC) for marking active nodes and collecting garbage nodes. The system is derived by using both the correctness and efficiency arguments. Assuming that memory references are indivisible the system satisfies the following properties: No critical sections are needed in the entire system. The time to perform the marking phase by the GC is independent of the size of memory, but depends only on the number of active nodes. Nodes on the free list need not be marked during the marking phase by the GC. Minimum overheads are introduced to the LP. Only two extra bits for encoding four colors are needed for each node. Efficiency results show that the parallel system is usually significantly more efficient in terms of storage and time than the sequential stack algorithm. (Author).

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