| This thesis is concerned with the design and implementation of task migration for long-running computing-intensive parallel applications in the architecturally heterogeneous network of computers environment. First, this thesis presents a heterogeneous migration model for the target applications. The migration model proposes the following: that a heterogeneous migration system should be built at the application level to achieve better portability; that a source code level approach can be used to provide good programming flexibility to the supported programming languages; that a heterogeneous migration system can use the checkpointing model to provide the flexibility to choose between moving forward and rolling back to reach a migration point; and that an independent checkpoint model can limit the overhead of a rollback introduced by the checkpointing model in a migration. Second, this thesis presents the design of a migration system, Portable Migration Toolkit (PMT), which is based on the proposed migration model. Finally, this thesis presents experiments which measure the performance of PMT. The experimental results suggest that PMT introduces a reasonable overhead in case of no migration, has efficient migration mechanisms, and can improve the performance of parallel applications under the conditions where a migration system is expected to perform favorably. The general performance of the PMT system thus demonstrates the feasibility of the heterogeneous migration model proposed in this thesis. |
