On Improving Thread Migration: Safety and Performance

Application-level migration schemes have been paid more attention recently because of their great potential for heterogeneous migration. But they are facing an obstacle that few migration-unsafe features in certain programming languages prevent some programs from migrating. Most application-level migration schemes declare or assume they are dealing with "safe" programs which confuse users without explanation. This paper proposes an application-level thread migration package, MigThread, to identify "unsafe" features in C/C++ and migrate this kind of programs with correct results. Therefore, users need not worry if their programs are qualified for migration as they experienced before. Besides the existing characteristics like scalability and flexibility, MigThread improves transparency and reliability. Complexity analysis and performance evaluation illustrate the migration efficiency.