Process Migration

Process Migration

Time • Selecting a process to be

Source Site Destination Site migrated
Process P1
: • Selecting the destination
:
: node
:
Execution • Suspending the process
suspended
Freezing Transfer of • Capturing the process state
time control
Execution • Sending the state to the
Resumed
: destination
:
: • Resuming the process
:
Process P1 • Forwarding future messages
to the destination
 Process Migration
Benefits

• Better response time and execution speed-up

– Dynamic load balancing among multiple nodes
– Using a faster CPU
• Higher throughput and Effective resource utilization
– Migrating I/O and CPU-bound processes to file and cycle
servers.
• Reducing network traffic
– Migrating processes closer to the resources they are using
most heavily.
• Improving system reliability
– Migrating processes from a site in failure to more reliable
sites
– Replicating and migrating critical processes to a remote.
 Process Migration
State Capturing

• CPU registers
– Captured upon a freeze
• Address space
– Difficult to restore pointers
• I/O state:
– Fast I/O Operations
• Completed before a process migration
– Durable I/O Operations like files and user interactions
• Difficult to carry files in use and to freeze/restore system calls.
• Necessity to maintain a connection with I/O established at the source
node.
• Some popular files available at the destination node
 Process Migration
Address Transfer Mechanisms

Total Freezing Pretransferring Transfer-on-reference

Source Destination Source Destination Source Destination
node node node node node node

Suspended
Migration Migration Migration
Suspended decision decision Freezing decision
time

Freezing Transfer of Transfer of On-demand resumed

time address space Suspended address space transfer

Freezing
resumed time resumed

Merits: freezing time reduceMerits: quick migration

erits: easy implementation
emerits: long delayDemerits:
time Demerits:
total time extended large memory lat
 Process Migration
Message Forwarding Mechanisms
Resending messages Ask origin site
Origin Origin
Sender Receiver Sender Receiver
Send Send

ResendMigrate Migrate

Dest 1 Forward Dest 1

Resend again

Migrate again Migrate again

Dest 2 Dest 2
 Process Migration
Message Forwarding Mechanisms (Cont’d)

Link traversal Link Update

Origin Origin
Sender Receiver Sender Receiver
Send Send

Forward New location

Send Link
Migrate Migrate
Send
Dest 1 Dest 1
Forward New location
Link
Migrate again Send Migrate again

Current location
Dest 2 Dest 2
 Process Migration for
Heterogeneous Systems
 Process Migration
Heterogeneous Systems

• Using external data representation

• Floating-point data
– External data representation must have at least as much space as the
longest floating-point data representation
– Process migration is restricted to only the machines that can avoid the
over/underflow and the loss of precision.
• Architectural-dependent data representation
– Singed-infinity and singed-zero
• In general, process migration over heterogeneous systems are too
expensive
– Conversion work
– Architectural-dependent representation handling
• Always interrupting external data representation
– Java