Currently, software engineering is becoming even more complex due to distributed computing. In this new context, portability while providing the programmer with the single system image of a classical Java Virtual Machine (JVM) is one of the key issues. Hence a cluster-aware JVM, which can transparently execute Java applications in a distributed fashion on the nodes of a cluster, is really desirable. This way multi-threaded server applications can take advantage of cluster resources without increasing their programming complexity. However, such kind of JVM is not easy to design and one of the most challenging tasks is the development of an efficient, scalable and automatic dynamic memory manager. Inside this manager, one important module is the automatic recycling mechanism or Garbage Collector (GC). It is a module with very intensive processing demands that must concurrently run with user's application. Hence, it consumes a very critical portion of the total execution time spent inside JVM in uniprocessor systems, and its overhead increases in distributed GCs because of the update of changing references in different nodes. In this work we propose an object placement strategy based on the connectivity graph and executed by the GC. Our results show that the choice of an efficient technique produces significant differences both in performance and inter-nodes messaging overhead. Moreover, our presented strategy improves performance with respect to state-of-the-art distributed JVM proposals.
