Process Hijacking

Process checkpointing is a basic mechanism required for providing High Throughput Computing service on distributively owned resources. We present a new process checkpoint and migration technique, called process hijacking, that uses dynamic program re-writing techniques to add checkpointing capability to a running program. Process hijacking makes it possible to checkpoint and migrate proprietary applications that cannot be re-linked with a checkpoint library, and it makes it possible to dynamically hand off an ordinary running process to a distributed resource management system such as Condor. We discuss the problems of adding checkpointing capability to a program already in execution: (1) loading new code into the running process, and (2) replacing functions of the process with calls to dynamically loaded functions. We use the DynInst API process editing library, augmented with a new call for replacing functions, to solve these problems. We discuss problems associated with migrating a...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1999
• Where: HPDC
• Authors: Victor C. Zandy, Barton P. Miller, Miron Livny
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPDC 1999, Ordinary Running Process, Process Checkpointing, Running Process