Dynamic Process Migration Based on Block Access Patterns Occurring in Storage Servers

Abstract

An emerging trend in developing large and complex applications on today’s high-performance computers is to couple independent components into a comprehensive application. The components may employ the global file system to exchange their data when executing the application. In order to reduce the time required for input/output (I/O) data exchange and data transfer in the coupled systems or other applications, this article proposes a dynamic process migration mechanism on the basis of block access pattern similarity for utilizing the local file cache to exchange the data. We first introduce the scheme of the block access counting diagram to profile the process access pattern during a time period on the storage server. Next, we propose an algorithm that compares the access patterns of processes running on different computing nodes. Last, processes are migrated in order to group processes with similar access patterns. Consequently, the processes on the computing node can exchange their data by accessing the local file cache, instead of the global file system. The experimental results show that the proposed process migration mechanism can reduce the execution time required by the application because of the shorter I/O time, as well as yield attractive I/O throughput. In summary, this dynamic process migration technique can work fairly well for distributed applications whose data dependency rely on distributed file systems.