Process Migration Based on Gobelins Distributed Shared Memory

Clusters are attractive for executing sequential and parallel applications. However, there is a need to design a cluster distributed operating system to provide a Single System Image. A cluster operating system providing both a DSM system and load balancing is attractive for efficiently executing a workload of sequential applications and shared memory parallel applications. Gobelins is a distributed operating system dedicated to clusters that provides both a DSM system and a process migration mechanism to support load balancing. In this paper, we present the implementation of Gobelins process migration mechanism which exploits Gobelins kernel level DSM system. We show that Gobelins DSM allows to implement simply an efficient migration mechanism, that can be used to move processes or threads among cluster nodes. A prototype of Gobelins has been implemented. Some performance results are presented in this paper.