Application Migration for Virtual Work Environments

Abstract

We present tools for managing applications in a distributed virtual work environment. A virtual work environment is a system that interfaces with multiple users and executes multiple three-dimensional productivity applications simultaneously. The system runs on multiple workstations using partial or full application replication. Our system design is based on a distributed shared scene graph implementation that alleviates the application programmer from explicitly considering distribution, and avoids a separation of graphical and application data. We take the idea of unifying all system data in the scene graph to its logical consequence by implementing application instances as nodes in the scene graph. The distributed shared scene graph mechanism automatically takes care of application replication. In this paper, we focus on two extension for managing applications: Light-weight application migration allows to shift computational load of replicated applications from one host to another, while application migration streams live applications from host to host in a way that is transparent to the application programmer and user(s). We demonstrate how these tools can be applied for load balancing, dynamic workgroup management, remote collaboration, and even ubiquitous computing.

Reference

Submitted for publication