> I've done this before. You don't really mean process migration, you mean
> remote execution unless I misunderstood. Migration is something that you
> do to an existing process, remote execution is something you can do to
> a new process. The former is (a) a bad idea, and (b) extremely difficult and
> invasive to the kernel to fully implement. Fortunately, remote execution
> is extremely useful and quite easy to implement. In fact, I've just started
> rewriting a version of this I had running in Sun about 6 years ago.
You didn't get it, I _mean_ active process migration. I don't agree with
(a), because you need a way to migrate an existing process if you want
true load sharing. What's the point of remote execution, if suddenly all
those processes that were sleeping now use their time slice fully? I'm
aware of (b), but I'll try to get the least involvement of the kernel. As
I said, the kernel will support and help, but won't migrate anything on
it's own.
I don't want to reinvent rsh or rexec by creating another package for
remote execution.
> I had a version of make(1) that did all this stuff, I got a 45 minute
> to 3.5 minute speedup on a cluster 8 SS2's plus a 4/470 file server.
> Not bad, eh?
Really not bad! If I can get the migration stuff working the way I want,
the good old make would do very good just by spawning it's gccs on the
same machine, without even suspecting that they'll end up being transfered
somewhere else. :)
> I'm working on a new version of this same idea in Linux. I'm working
> on this with Don Becker & Dan Ridge of Beowulf fame and I need to rope
> Tridge (of AP1000 fame) into the project as well.
Cool. I have no fame apart from the usual Local Linux Guru, but maybe one
day they'll say: Fabio, of Linux with process migration fame :))).
I'll surely take a better look at Beowulf, as at the time I checked it out
I wasn't thinking about this project, so I didn't think they were so
close.
Thanks for the suggestions!
Fabio
( Fabio Olive Leite leitinho@akira.ucpel.tche.br )
( Computing Science Student http://akira.ucpel.tche.br/~leitinho/ )
( )
( LOADLIN.EXE: The best Windows95 application. [Debian GNU/Linux] )