Process Placement versus Process Migration Process placement entails selecting a suitable node for a given process to execute. In other words it is simply a remote execution facility.
Migration involves interrupting a running process and restoring it on a different computer.
Migration is rather more costly than placement, since the amount of state and the complexity of obtaining it increases significantly once a process begins execution. In addition, the whole process of migration involves a significant amount of computational overhead, so determining whether there is likely to be a performance improvement is non-trivial. They found that, whilst placement alone is capable of a large improvement in performance, the addition of migration achieves considerable additional improvement in many cases. Process initiation rates should be heterogeneous. The file system should store significant amounts locally, with little replication at other nodes.