What is the need of process migration and explain the role of resource to process and process to resource binding in process migration.

Q. What is the need of process migration and explain the role of resource to process and process to resource binding in process migration. (December 2018) (10 Marks)

Ans- 

• In computing, process migration is a specialized form of process management whereby processes are moved from one computing environment to another. This originated in distributed computing, but is now used more widely. On multi core machines (multiple cores on one processor or multiple processors) process migration happens as a standard part of process scheduling, and it is quite easy to migrate a process within a given machine, since most resources (memory, files, sockets) do not need to be changed, only the execution context (primarily program counter and registers).
• The traditional form of process migration is in computer clusters where processes are moved from machine to machine, which is significantly more difficult, as it requires serializing the process image and migrating or reacquiring resources at the new machine

Need of Process Migration

Dynamic  Load  Balancing : It  allows  processes  to  take  advantage  of  less  loaded  2 nodes by migrating from overloaded ones.

Availability : Processes  reside  on  a  failure  node  can  be  migrated  to  other  healthy  nodes. 

System Administration : Processes  that  reside  on  a  node  that  is  to  be  undergone  system maintenance can be migrated to other nodes. 

Data  Locality : Processes  can  take  advantage  of  locality  of  data  or  other  special  capabilities of a particular node. 

Mobility : Processes can be migrated from a handheld device or laptop computer to a  more  powerful  server  computer  before  the  device  get  disconnected  from  the  network.  

Fault Recovery : The  mechanism  to  halt,  transport  and  resume  a  process  is  technically  useful  to  support  fault  recovery  in  mission-critical  or  transaction-based  applications. 

A process involves code segment + resources segment + execution segment.

Binding can be initiated by sender or receiver.

In sender initiated code is with sender sends a query to data server is an example of sender initiated in which process binds to resource.

In receiver initiated : Receiver gets process migrated on demand.