A brief survey of systems providing process or object migration facilities

Abstract

Migration is the movement of an active entity from one machine to another during execution. Such migration may be used for dynamic load balancing purposes with the aim of gaining increased performance from a group of processors than may be gained by schemes simply allocating processes to processors at run time. Schemes providing object migration also offer object persistence, improved fault tolerance and potentially more efficient remote object invocation (RPC).The survey covers systems providing process migration over both modified and unmodified UNIX and various experimental operating systems. Task migration over two modern microkernel-based operating systems is followed by a section on a number of object migration facilities with objects of varying granularity.