Migratable sockets in cluster computing

Optimal utilization of cluster computing is partly dependent upon pre-emptive process migration. However, this migration involves a host of issues, one of them being the transfer of system-dependent resources. We focus on the overhead incurred by migrated processes using sockets. We then describe a solution that we devised and implemented to avoid this overhead through the use of ‘migratable sockets’. Our studies show that the use of ‘migratable sockets’ considerably improves the execution time of a process using sockets as compared to the execution time of a process that uses standard sockets and thus bears the communication overhead. 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.