Transparent process migration: Design alternatives and the Sprite implementation

Abstract

The Sprite operating system allows executing processes to be moved between hosts at any time. We use this process migration mechanism to offload work onto idle machines, and also to evict migrated processes when idle workstations are reclaimed by their owners. Sprite's migration mechanism provides a high degree of transparency both for migrated processes and for users. Idle machines are identified, and eviction is invoked, automatically by daemon processes. On Sprite it takes up to a few hundred milliseconds on SPARCstation 1 workstations to perform a remote exec, while evictions typically occur in a few seconds. The pmake program uses remote invocation to invoke tasks concurrently. Compilations commonly obtain speedup factors in the range of three to six; they are limited primarily by contention for centralized resources such as file servers. CPU-bound tasks such as simulations can make more effective use of idle hosts, obtaining as much as eight-fold speedup over a period of hours. Process migration has been in regular service for over two years.