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K12LTSP + MOSIX Howto
Paul Nelson writes "Richard Camp posted a very complete, step by step guide to building a MOSIX cluster. "...The objective of this howto is to guide the reader on setting up a Mosix cluster with diskless nodes. The setup is based on K12ltsp Project. This should provide an easily scalable system."
This is exactly where I feel Linux should be used. The idea of dumb terminals and a central server has proven to be the most cost effective way for companies to implement computer technology.
It's becoming clear that Intel/AMD etc are going to crush most other general purpose CPUs. Be it with SMP or SMT or both. With the increase in PCI bandwidth coming and the heralded 64bit chips intel will start to take over more and more server machines. Remember in the steel industry people scoffed at mini mills, kodak scoffed at digital cameras etc etc.
In the future most companies will have dumb terminals and a server room with racks of cheap intel boxes. The OS on the server will be fault tolerant to the max, oh I lost a node ahh well only 255 left. Uptimes measured in years. Hang on a sec that sounds like an IBM or SUN mainframe.
What is rapidly becoming apparent is that network speed is now more important than CPU/MEMORY speed.
I think this is where clustering should be done, for now at least, at the thread level. Most programs are multi-threaded. Most people don't want to rewrite programs to support MPI or PVM. Lots of projects that previously had to implement their own clustering protocols can just utilize Mosix instead. If I could talk my boss into it, I would put Linux/Mosix on every desktop at work and have a giant Mosix cluster. This is the future of computing.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
no, but with the $100 you saved not buying a disk you could have an extra 256MB of VERY FAST scratch space.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"