Parallel Garbage Collection for Shared Memory Multiprocessors

We present a multiprocessor “stop-the-world” garbage collection framework that provides multiple forms of load balancing. Our parallel collectors use this framework to balance the work of root scanning, using static overpartitioning, and also to balance the work of tracing the object graph, using a form of dynamic load balancing called work stealing. We describe two collectors written using this framework: pSemispaces, a parallel semispace collector, and pMarkcompact, a parallel markcompact collector.