A Stack-on-Demand Execution Model for Elastic Computing

Abstract

Cloud computing is all the rage these days; its confluence with mobile computing would bring an even more pervasive influence. Clouds per se are elastic computing infrastructure where mobile applications can offload or draw tasks in an on-demand push-pull manner. Lightweight and portable task migration support enabling better resource utilization and data access locality is the key for success of mobile cloud computing. Existing task migration mechanisms are however too coarse-grained and costly, offsetting the benefits from migration and hampering flexible task partitioning among the mobile and cloud resources. We propose a new computation migration technique called stack-on-demand (SOD) that exports partial execution states of a stack machine to achieve agile mobility, easing into small-capacity devices and flexible distributed execution in a multi-domain workflow style. Our design also couples SOD with a novel object faulting technique for efficient access to remote objects. We implement the SOD concept into a middleware system for transparent execution migration of Java programs. It is shown that SOD migration cost is pretty low, comparing to several existing migration mechanisms. We also conduct experiments with an iPhone handset to demonstrate the elasticity of SOD by which server-side heavyweight processes can run adaptively on the cell phone.