Heterogeneous process migration: the Tui system

✍ Scribed by Peter Smith; Norman C. Hutchinson

• Book ID: 101239709
• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 158 KB
• Volume: 28
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0038-0644
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-024x(199805)28:6<611::aid-spe169>3.0.co;2-f

✦ Synopsis

Heterogeneous 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. ©1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.