Migration and Rollback Transparency for Arbitrary Distributed Applications in Workstation Clusters

Progralnmers 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 ~aBEAM system [18] uses a global virtual name space to provide migration and rollback transparency in user space for distributed groups of processes on workstations. 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. 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 advantage of this approach is that it can handle even unmodified (e. g. commercially bought) application programs. We compare measured performance figures with previous similar approaches [15, 20].