Process/Thread Migration and Checkpointing in Heterogeneous Distributed Systems

Process/thread migration and checkpointing are indis-pensable for resource sharing, cycle stealing, and other modes of interaction. To provide a flexible, transparent, and portable solution in heterogeneous environments, we have developed a multi-grained migration/checkpointing package, MigThread, which can migrate/checkpoint multi-ple threads to different machines or file systems simultane-ously, and also perform single coarse-grained process mi-gration/checkpointing. For scalability and portability, com-putation states are extracted out of their original places and abstracted to the language level. With the user-level stack/heap management, MigThread does not rely on any thread libraries and operating systems. For heterogeneity, a novel data conversion scheme is proposed to analyze data types automatically and convert data only on the receiver side. For safety, MigThread detects and overcomes “un-safe ” factors to qualify virtually all C programs for migra-tion/checkpointing. Some performance measurements are given to illustrate its effectiveness. 1