The implementation of dynamite: an environment for migrating PVM tasks

Parallel programming on clusters of workstations is increasingly attractive, but dynamic load balancing is needed to make efficient use of the available resources. Dynamite provides dynamic load balancing for PVM applications running under Linux and Solaris. It supports migration of individual tasks between nodes in a manner transparent both to the application programmer and to the user, implemented entirely in user space. Dynamically linked executables are supported, as are tasks with open files and with direct PVM connections. In this paper, we describe the technical aspects of migrating message-passing tasks.