User-Level Process Migration Mechanism

Abstract

In networks of workstations, running processes lead to a situation, in which some of the nodes are highly loaded whereas other nodes may remain lightly loaded or almost idle. It may lead to reduction in throughput and lot of computational power offered by the lightly loaded or the idle processors. This computational power goes unused while the jobs are striving for the availability of processor-cycles. The issue of efficient utilization of computing resources is noteworthy in the networked workstations such as local area networks as well; which can be tackled by spreading the running processes among the connected workstations by means of the mechanism such as process migration. The application of process migration mechanism may consequent into the proficient utilization of the overall networked computing environment through the utilization of the lightly loaded workstations or the almost idle workstations. The paper discusses characteristics of many user level process migration mechanisms. Keywords: process migration, load balancing, process checkpointing, user-level process migration, distributed systems