Maintaining Communication Links with Migrating Components

In systems aiming at high-speed distributed applications, load balancing plays an essential role. If a process can be easily broken down into several sub-parts, it is possible to do the load balancing transparently to the user application. This is possible if processes consist of multiple threads, distributed objects, or logical nodes. Then some of these parts could be transparently migrated from overloaded process to the underloaded ones by the runtime system. During component migration, the communication links among the system components must be preserved. To allow efficient load balancing, the migration should have minimal effect on the performance of the non-migrating components of the system. This paper presents a migration mechanism for preserving communication links between system components. The presented mechanism uses minimal knowledge of the system topology and requires only the component being moved to stop computing while in transit, which makes this algorithm applicable to large distributed computations.