Service migration in distributed virtual machines for adaptive grid computing

Computational grids can integrate geographically distributed resources into a seamless environment. To facilitate managing these heterogeneous resources, the virtual machine technology provides a powerful layer of abstraction and allows multiple applications to multiplex the resources of a grid computer. On the other hand, the grid dynamics requires the virtual machine system be distributed and reconfigurable. However, the existing migration approaches only move the execution entities, such as processes, threads, and mobile agents, among servers and leave the runtime services behind. They are not potent to achieve service reconfiguration in face of server overload or failures. In this paper, we propose a service migration mechanism, which moves the computational services of a virtual server, for instance a shared array runtime support system, to available servers for adaptive grid computing. In this way, parallel jobs can resume computation on a remote server without requiring service preinstallation. As an illustration of the service migration mechanism, we incorporated it into a Java-compliant distributed virtual machine, DSA, and formed a Mobile DSA (M-DSA) to accommodate adaptive parallel applications in grids. We measured the performance of M-DSA in the execution of applications from the SPLASH-2 benchmark suite on a campus grid. Experimental results show that service migration can achieve system adaptivity effectively.