Class-Based Garbage Collection in Object-Oriented Programming Environments

Many garbage collection algorithms have been proposed, but few address the special needs of long-running server programs. Server applications usually run for years and spawn many threads, so they create and discard thousands of objects. Therefore, efficient garbage collection is especially important for those applications. This paper presents a class-based garbage collector for object-oriented programming environments that classifies objects by their types to achieve better gradualness. Grouping objects of the same type into a group, with a limited type-lock, a mutator cache and the lease protocol will reduce memory fragmentation, which is especially important for the efficiency of long-running server applications. This class-based collector partitions the heap space by type, which provides better concurrency than the traditional mark-sweep collector, and its reusable garbaged object pool also reduces the object allocation overhead. This paper also discusses the implementation details, such as the mutator cache and the lease protocol, and techniques to achieve better accuracy.     

Building a Portable File System for Heterogeneous Clusters

Existing in-kernel distributed file systems cannot cope with the higher requirements in wellequipped cluster environments, especially when the system becomes larger and inevitably heterogeneous.TH-CluFS is a cluster file system designed for large heterogeneous systems. TH-CluFS is implemented completely in the user space by emulating the network file system (NFS) V2 server, and is easily portable to other portable operating system interface (POSIX)-compliant platforms with application programming/binary interface API/ABI compliance. In addition, TH-CluFS uses a serverless architecture which flexibly distributes data at file granularity and achieves a consistent file system view from distributed metadata. The global cache makes full use of the aggregated memories and disks in the cluster to optimize system performance.Experimental results suggest that although TH-CluFS is implemented as user-level components, it functions as a portable, single system image, and scalable cluster file system with acceptable performance sacrifices.