Process migration is a desirable and useful facility for the Network of Workstations (NOW). This paper presents a novel migration protocol called quasi-asynchronous migration for PVM tasks, which allows non-migrating tasks to execute during most of the time of migration. Message flushing and message delaying are the key mechanisms used in quasi-asynchronous migration. Because the protocol is implemented on top of PVM and at user-level, it is both transparent to users and portable. Both the analysis of the migration protocol and the experimental results show that quasi-asynchronous migration has lower overhead than other migration protocols.
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