Migratable sockets in cluster computing

Optimal utilization of cluster computing is partly dependent upon pre-emptive process migration. However, this migration involves a host of issues, one of them being the transfer of system-dependent resources. We focus on the overhead incurred by migrated processes using sockets. We then describe a solution that we devised and implemented to avoid this overhead through the use of `migratable sockets'. Our studies show that the use of `migratable sockets' considerably improves the execution time of a process using sockets as compared to the execution time of a process that uses standard sockets and thus bears the communication overhead.