In this paper we introduce the concept of temporal locality of commUnici:Ltion for process groups. Empirical evidence suggests that, once a member of a process group starts to communicate with other processes in the group, it will continue to do so, while an independent process will maintain its state of isolation for some time. Other instances of inertial behavior of programs are known. Temporal and spatIal locality of reference are example of inertial behavior of programs, exploited by hierarchical storage systems; once a block of information (program or data) is brought into faster storage, It 1s very likely that it will be referenced again within a short time frame.The temporal locality of communlcation can be used to schedule concurrently multiple process groups. When process groups exhibit temporal locality of commun..ic;:Liion, this information can be used to hide the latency of paging and I/O operations, to perform dynamic scheduling to reduce processor fragmentation, and to identify optimal instances of time for checkpointing of process groups.

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