Accelerating Application Migration in HPC
It is predicted that the number of cores per node will rapidly increase with the upcoming era of exascale supercomputers. As a result, multiple applications will have to share one node and compete for the (often scarce) resources available on this node. Furthermore, the growing number of hardware components causes a decrease in the mean time between failures. Application migration between nodes has been proposed as a tool to mitigate these two problems: Bottlenecks due to resource sharing can be addressed by load balancing schemes which migrate applications; and hardware errors can often be tolerated by the system if faulty nodes are detected and processes are migrated ahead of time.
Migration Techniques in HPC Environments
Process migration is an important feature in modern computing centers as it allows for a more efficient use and maintenance of hardware. Especially in virtualized infrastructures it is successfully exploited by schemes for load balancing and energy efficiency. One can divide the tools and techniques into three groups: Process-level migration, virtual machine migration, and container-based migration.