State of the art in heterogeneous strong migration of computations

The emergence of new environments, such as grids and mobile devices, poses new requirements for programming systems and models. Migration techniques, which have been extensively studied but not widely used, gain a chance to rise in light of these requirements. This survey reviews a particular case of migration that fits well into those environments—that is, heterogeneous strong migration of running computations at application level. We approach it from an implementation point of view, commenting on related issues and current solutions. We discuss the strong influence that language support for migration has on implementation issues, and the advantages that a higher level of support would represent for the portability and performance of the application, as well as in terms of control and flexibility for the programmer. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.