State-carrying code for computation mobility

Computation mobility enables running programs to move around among machines and is the essence of performance gain, fault tolerance, and system throughput increase. State-carrying code (SCC) is a software mechanism to achieve such computation mobility by saving and retrieving computation states during normal program execution in heterogeneous multi-core/many-core clusters. This chapter analyzes different kinds of state saving/retrieving mechanisms for their pros and cons. To achieve a portable, flexible and scalable solution, SCC adopts the application-level thread migration approach. Major deployment features are explained and one example system, MigThread, is used to illustrate implementation details. Future trends are given to point out how SCC can evolve into a complete lightweight virtual machine. New high productivity languages might step in to raise SCC to language level. With SCC, thorough resource utilization is expected.