Evaluation of process migration for parallel heterogeneous workstation clusters

In this paper we present an evaluation of process migration as a technique to enhance the use of a general purpose workstation cluster as a reliable parallel environment. We have verified the approach, considering some programs implemented in MPI (Message-Passing Interface) and executing these programs in a non-dedicated workstation cluster, as a testbed environment. Our primaries results suggest that the considered configuration can provide some interesting features for the use of computer network based parallel environment. The mpich package, which is an implementation of the standard MPI, was adopted as the parallel programming environment. In addition, the Hector software tool was used to allow transparently the migration between workstations.