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."

Comments

At last...

[Usquebaugh]

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.

MOSIX Deployment

[PatJensen]

There is a much better, easier way to deploy a MOSIX cluster. This article is poorly written, and missing several important sections. It is not for the kernel-phobic or beginner users. The preferred way to bring up a diskless cluster with easy tear down, no maintenance, and no network booting required is to use ClumpOS.

ClumpOS is a bootable CD with network drivers that is pre-setup with a custom kernel that contains MOSIX and MFS out of the box with no work required. You can download and burn ClumpOS and then boot it on your slave machines.

As far as building your MOSIX master goes, I prefer Debian with the prebuilt easy to deploy MOSIX packages and kernel patches. The links to find both are below:

Clump/OS: A CD-based mini distribution
MOSIX on Debian

MOSIX is a fun, extremely useful tool. Just remember when building your Debian kernel to make sure to turn ALL options on for MOSIX, this includes MFS. Otherwise, you will have weird problems with not being able to migrate processes to your cluster.

-Pat

OpenMOSIX

[GigsVT]

Also, be sure to support OpenMOSIX

Apparently MOSIX is going to go closed source, so test out OpenMOSIX if you can, the project is really taking off and has several contributers, but it needs your help in testing the kernels. OpenMOSIX is being sucessfully used in major installations now, so it should be fine for what you want to use it for, and also you won't be getting yourself going on a (soon to be) proprietary path.