Migration and Rollback Transparency for Arbitrary Distributed Applications in Workstation Clusters

Programmers and users of compute intensive scientific applications often do not want to (or even cannot) code load balancing and fault tolerance into their programs. The PBEAM system [18] uses a global virtual name space to provide migration and rollback transparency in user space for distributed groups of processes on workstations. Applications always use the same virtual names for the operating system objects, independent of their current real location. The system calls are interposed and their parameters translated between the name spaces. Unlike other migration mechanisms, PBEAM does not require the applications to be written for a specific programming model or communication library. The first approach to execute applications in the virtual name space was to link the programs with a modified system library. Now, In this paper we describe design and implementation of a separate system call interposition process [3] that accesses the application via the debugging interface. The main ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: IPPS
• Authors: Stefan Petri, Matthias Bolz, Horst Langendörfer
• Keywords: Code Load Balancing, Current Real Location, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Intensive Scientific Applications, IPPS 1998