Transparent Distribution Middleware for General Purpose Computations

A huge installed base of general-purpose (often sequential) applications cannot take advantage of distributed systems. This paper presents a design and initial prototypes of a set of techniques, called adaptive virtualization, that endows regular applications with features for exploiting a distributed environment. These features include the ability to be scheduled on diverse CPUs, adapting to availability of resources, handling faults, and moving around in a distributed system. Our approach is to first lift the executing binary of the application off of the operating system using the API interception technique. Then we insert a middleware layer between the application and the operating system. This layer emulates the base operating system as far as the application is concerned, but actually builds a distributed operating system that the application run on. This technique essentially virtualizes all resources of a distributed system and creates a large virtual multiprocessor. Keywords:..