Thread-based Mobility for a Distributed Dataflow Language

Abstract Strong mobility enables migration of entire computations combining code, data, and execution state (such as stack and program counter) between sites of computation. This is in contrast to weak mobility were migration is confined to just code and data. Strong mobility is essential for many applications where reconstruction of execution states is either difficult or even impossible. Typical application areas are load balancing, reduction of network latency and traffic, and resource-related migration, just to name a few. This thesis presents a model, programming abstractions, an implementation, and an evaluation of thread-based strong mobility. The model extends a distributed programming model based on automatic synchronization via dataflow variables. The programming abstractions capture various migration scenarios. These scenarios differ in how migration source and destination relate to the site initiating migration. The implementation is based on replication of concurrent lightweight threads between sites controlled by migration managers. The model is implemented in the Mozart programming system. The first version is complete and a work concerning resource rebinding is still in progress