1. A method of performing a garbage collection cycle on a parallel computing system having a plurality of compute nodes, comprising: identifying an object space in a memory of a first compute node, wherein the object space stores one or more objects allocated by a computing job running on the first compute node; evaluating each object in the object space to determine whether the memory allocated to each respective object is eligible to be collected; upon determining that the memory allocated to a given object is eligible to be collected, removing the given object from the object space and returning memory allocated to the given object to a pool; determining a set of garbage collection statistics associated with at least one evaluated object in the object space; and transmitting the set of garbage collection statistics to a master garbage collector running on a second compute node of the parallel computing system.