Parallel generational garbage collection

With the advent of parallel systems, opportunities for efficiency exist that have yet to be exploited, especially in the area of garbage collection. In this paper, a parallel generational garbage collection algorithm is presented that extends previous work by exploiting opportunities for parallelism in the garbage collection process itself. A prototype implementation of the parallel generational collector was developed and its execution simulated to determine its efficiency. For a certain class of programs, the parallel generational collector performed up to 67% less copying than a parallel copy collector and reduced elapsed times up to an additional 12%; corresponding reductions in overhead for the ongoing program were also observed.

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