Speedup of Distributed Programs on a Network of Shared Processors

This paper presents an alternative to process migration , called competition, to speed up distributed programs in the background on a network of processors. Competition protocols are transparent operating system facilities that involve creating multiple instances (called clones) p 1 , p 2 , etc. of a process P on diier-ent processors, and making clones \compete", i.e., attempting to guarantee that the output of the clone that is farthest \ahead" is fed to the rest of the computation , and that the entire application's performance tracks that of the clone which is farthest ahead. We show that competition protocols ooer performance beneets that are as good as or better than migration protocols for distributed programs under comparable assumptions. We also demonstrate that competition protocols ooer even more speedup for distributed programs than for sequential programs.