Clusterproc; Linux kernel Support for Clusterwide Process Management

There are several kernel-based clusterwide process management implementations available today, each of which provides different semantics and capabilities (OpenSSI, openMosix, bproc, Kerrighed, etc.). We present a set of hooks to allow various installable kernel module implementations with a high degree of flexibility and virtually no performance impact. Optional capabilities that can be implemented via the hooks include: clusterwide unique pids, single, init, heterogeneity, transparent visibility and access to any process from any node, ability to distribute processes at exec or fork or thru migration, file inheritance and full controlling terminal semantics, node failure cleanup, clusterwide /proc/<pid>, checkpoint/restart and scale to thousands of nodes. In addition, we describe an OpenSSI-inspired implementation using the hooks and providing all the features described above.