General Purpose Process Migration

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PI: Partha DasguptaThe process migration problem has received a lot of attention but hasproduced only mixed results. Traditionally, migration mechanisms havebeen used to balance the load among processors in a distributedsystem. However, most mechanisms proposed to date for general-purposeapplications have required extensive operating system kernelmodifications. Hence, conventional wisdom has held that the costs ofprocess migration are not justified by resulting benefits. Thisresearch takes a new look at process migration, recognizing both itsutility for an increasing number of emerging applications that cantolerate higher overheads, as well as the possibility of implementingnecessary mechanisms using novel user-level techniques. Processmigration enables a host of capabilities such as mobility,collaborative work, distributed systems management, automaticreconfigurability, and fault-tolerance. Moreover, API interceptiontechnologies, which permit insertion of arbitrary functionality in theexecution path of an application's interactions with the underlyingoperating system, enable process migration to be implemented withoutkernel modification. This research investigates a virtualizationscheme that decouples an application from dependencies in theoperating system and the physical environment. Virtualization alsomonitors and controls the interactions and the resulting side effectsbetween processes and operating systems, making process migrationpossible.