HPCM: a pre-compiler aided middleware for the mobility of legacy code

Mobility is a fundamental functionality of the next generation Internet computing. How to support mobility for legacy codes, however, is still an issue of research. The key to solve this outstanding issue is the support of heterogeneous process migration. During the last few years, we have successfully developed mechanisms to support heterogeneous process migration of legacy codes written in C, C++, and Fortran. We present in this paper the design of the high performance computing mobility (HPCM) middleware, the development and implementation of its key components, pre-compiler and its static libraries. Due to the similarity between process migration and checkpointing, the pre-compiler not only makes automatic process migration of legacy codes feasible, but also supports dynamic heterogeneous checkpointing. We perform a set of tests and compare experimental results with Porch, a well-known portable heterogeneous checkpointing system. The experimental results show that our methods are feasible, efficient and very promising.