Indirect distributed garbage collection

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Abstract
In new distributed systems, object mobility is usually allowed and is sometimes used by the underlying object manager system to benefit from object access locality. On the other hand, in-transit references to objects can exist at any moment in asynchronous distributed systems. In the presence of object mobility and in-transit references, many garbage collector (GC) algorithms fail to operate correctly. Others need to use the system's object finder to find the objects while performing their work. As a general principle, a GC should never interfere with object manager polices (such as forcing migration or fixing an object to a given processor). However, if the GC uses the object finder, it will change the access pattern of the system, and eventually it could foul the global allocation policy. In this article we propose a new GC family, Indirect Garbage Collectors, allowing to separate the problems of object management (placement, replication, and retrieval) from garbage collection. This property allows our algorithms to be implemented on top of almost any existent distributed object system, without having to use the object finder.

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