OpenMosix

Francesco Taurino writes "Moshe Bar has released a new Mosix system: openMosix. From the site: "For thousands of users Mosix has been a reliable, fast and cost efficient clustering platform. There are hundreds of Mosix installations in life sciences, finance, industry, high tech, research and government environments. The goal of openMosix is to give to these users a continued support and an up-to-date platform. openMosix is initially fully compatible with the last Mosix (1.5.2 for 2.4.13) kernel, but is now growing in its own direction. If you would like to contribute to the openMosix project, drop a line to moshe@openmosix.org.""

Comments

I never heard of mosix,

[whovian]

and since information is a bit lacking at the link provided, here's a link to the regular mosix FAQ.

Re:Building a mosix cluster

[Hamshrew]

I don't have a link handy, as it's been a few months. I found it to be fairly simple to install... I had 4 PIII machines, set them all up on an internal network and nfs mounted a directory from the head. From there, it was a simple series of steps:

Unpack kernel sources.
Run the Mosix install script.

Did that on each node, then started the mosix service on each.

It worked like a charm for large computations, but had three flaws for normal use.

1) By default, it does not auto-migrate, which was pretty dumb. And getting it to auto-migrate was buried deep in the docs, though it could be guessed from reading up on locks. (echo 1 > /proc/self/lock, I think it was)

2) Migration only occurrs after a certain load average is maintained... if your job involves spawning multiple short-lived processes, like a large compile, it doesn't migrate anyway.

3) Network usage for migration was very heavy over Fast Ethernet.

There you have it. It's the last reason that MOSIX isn't used often in commercial clusters, but it seems well-suited for other distributed computing applications, and has some interesting features, especially for NOW configurations.