The possibilities and limitations of heterogeneous process migration

Heterogeneous Process Migration is a technique that allows an active program to move between computers of differing architectures. While the program is executing, a migration tool will pause the program, locate the data values within the program's memory, convert them to a suitable format for the destination machine, then reconstruct the program on the destination machine so that it will continue executing correctly. Although a small number of heterogeneous migration mechanisms have been proposed, few of them have been constructed, and none have yet resulted in a mature and efficient implementation. The Tui system has been constructed to provide an efficient migration tool for use on four common architectures within the Unix environment. Implementation lessons were learned while optimizing the Tui system to gain performance. Tui has been used to derive a definition of migratibility. All other migration implementations have assumed that the program must be written in a type-safe language, or in a type-safe subset of a language. Since Tui has been designed to support heterogeneous migration of common languages that are non-type-safe, a survey of non-migratible language features has been undertaken. From this study, a definition for migratibility has been created, a framework for designing a migration tool has been given, and a comparison between migratibility and type-safety has shown that the two concepts are similar, yet different.

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