Transparent Process Migration for Distributed Applications in a Beowulf Cluster

Powerful, low-cost clusters of personal computers, such as Beowulf clusters, have fueled the potential for widespread distributed computation. While these Beowulf clusters typically have software that facilitates development of distributed applications, there is still a need for effective distributed computation that is transparent to the application programmer. This paper describes the design and development of the PANTS Application Node Transparency System (PANTS), which enables transparent distributed computation. PANTS employs a fault -tolerant communication architecture based on multicast communication that minimizes load on busy cluster nodes. PANTS runs on any modern distribution of Linux without requiring any kernel modifications.