Transparent Process Migration: Design Alternatives and the Sprite Implementation

The paper describes the process migration mechanism used in the Sprite operating system to offload work onto idle machines, and also to evict migrated processes when idle workstations are reclaimed by their owners. The authors have made trade-off between four factors while designing and implementing the mechanism: transparency, residual dependencies, performance and complexity. The authors claim to have emphasized transparency and performance, but overall the implementation has lead to mix of all above factors being sacrificed for each other at some point, except for transparency. Also, the importance of providing a high degree of transparency at the cost of all other factors and reliability of the system seems less warranted.