Heterogeneous process migration: the Tui system

Abstract

SUMMARYHeterogeneous process migration is a technique whereby an active process is moved from one machine to another. It must then continue normal execution and communication. The source and destination processors can have a different architecture, that is, different instruction sets and data formats. Because of this heterogeneity, the entire process memory image must be translated during the migration. Tui is a migration system that is able to translate the memory image of a program (written in ANSI-C) between four common architectures (m68000, SPARC, i486 and PowerPC). This requires detailed knowledge of all data types and variables used with the program. This is not always possible in non-type-safe (but popular) languages such as ANSI-C, Pascal and Fortran. The important features of the Tui algorithm are discussed in great detail. This includes the method by which a program's entire set of data values can be located, and eventually reconstructed on the target processor. Performance figures demonstrating the viability of using Tui to migrate real applications are given.

Process/thread migration and checkpointing in heterogeneous distributed systems

“…Migration/checkpointing-safety concerns ensuring correctness, e.g., computation states should be constructed and restored correctly [12,4]. Type-unsafe programming language such as C challenge this since during execution each memory block can hold data of any type, which could be totally different from the type declared in the program.…”

“…Type-safe languages can avoid certain type uncertainty and help achieve correct states. However, "type safety" is not the same as "migration/checkpointing safety" [12]. "Type safety" concerns type clarity and program correctness whereas the latter one focuses on constructing correct states.…”

“…"Type safety" does eliminate some migration/checkpointing-unsafe factors in languages, meanwhile some type-unsafe programs can still be qualified for migration/checkpointing. Without formal definitions of migration/checkpointing-safety, most existing migration/checkpointing systems declare to only work with "safe" programming [12,14] and leave the safety issues to programmers. Mechanism is on demand to identify unsafe factors in order to free programmers.…”

Centralized Run-Time Resource Management in a Network-on-Chip Containing Reconfigurable Hardware Tiles

“…Run-time task migration can be defined as relocation of an executing task from the source tile to the destination tile. In order to overcome the architectural differences between heterogeneous PEs, tasks can only migrate at pre-defined execution points in the code (further denoted as migration points) [10]. How to handle task state when migrating between a regular PE and a RH tile is detailed in [14].…”

“…Section 5 presents the conclusions. Related work [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] is discussed throughout the paper.…”