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process migration

A term for the ability of a distributed operating system to move processes from one workstation or subsystem to another around the network, automatically, according to demand.

Only a fully distributed operating system can support this functionality, since each process must see exactly the same environment on every subsystem it might be migrated to. This requirement seems really debatable and misleading, especially for TUNES: when a process migrates from a source system to a target system is sufficient to recreate enough context on the target so that the process can run. How much context is enough it depends from some selected arbitrarily criteria such as efficiency, security and so on. -- MaD70

Process migration allows a distributed system to take advantage of idle subsystems, from moment to moment, in order to maximise usage of the processing resources of the network. This is a form of network-wide load balancing.

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This page is linked from: Distributed