Towards Strong Mobility in the Shared Source CLI

Migrating a thread while preserving its state is a useful mechanism to have in situations where load balancing within applications with intensive data processing is required. Strong mobility systems, however, are rarely developed or implemented as they introduce a number of major challenges into the implementation of the system. This is due to the fact that the underlying infrastructure that most computers operate on was never designed to accommodate such a system, and because of this it actually impedes the development of these systems to some degree. Using a system based around a virtual machine, such as Microsoft’s Common Language Runtime (CLR), circumnavigates many of these problems by abstracting away system differences. In this paper we outline the architecture of the threading mechanism in the shared source version of the CLR known as the Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure (SSCLI). We also outline how we are porting strong mobility into the SSCLI, taking advantage of its virtual machine.