Transparent and portable agent based task migration for data-flow applications on multi-tiled architectures

Fully distributed memory multi-processors (MPSoC) implemented in multi-tiled architectures are promising solutions to support modern sophisticated applications, however, reliability of such systems is always an issue. As a result, system-level solution like task migration keeps its importance. Transferring the execution of a task from one tile to another helps keep acceptable reliability of such systems. A tile contains at least one processor and associated peripherals with a communication device responsible for inter-tile communications. We propose in this work a task migration technique that targets data-flow applications running on multi-tiled architectures. This technique uses a middleware layer that makes it transparent to application programmers and eases its portability over different multi-tiled architectures. It can be deployed on small operating systems that support neither MMU nor dynamic loading for task code. We show that this technique is operational on x86 based real hardware platform. Experimental results show low overhead both in memory and performance without much variance.