Transparent Migration of Distributed Communicating Processes

A Computing Community is a group of cooperating machines that behave like a single system and runs all general-purpose applications—without any modifications to the shrink-wrapped binary applications or the operating system. In order to realize such a system, we inject a wrapper DLL into an application at runtime that manages the execution of the application and endows it with features such as virtualization and mobility. This paper describes the concept of virtualization, and the mechanism of injection and the implementation of a wrapper DLL. We focus on one kind of applications, those that use sockets to communicate with other processes. We show how these processes can migrate between machines without disrupting the socket communications. We have implemented the software that needs to be injected into the application to enable this feature. Handling more application types is part of the continued research in the Computing Communities project.