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A Fast Start For openMosix
axehind writes "Dr. Moshe Bar recently announced the creation of openMosix, a new OpenSource project. The project has quickly attracted a team of volunteers developers from around the globe and is off to a very fast start. openMosix, is an extension of the Linux kernel. openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering. openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive. Once you have installed openMosix, the nodes in the cluster start talking to one another and the cluster adapts itself to the workload.
"
Oh wait...
Almost 5% of the text is the word openMosix. Is it more or did that post sound like an advertisment to recrute Open Source Developers. Now I am going to read the article.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
openMosix, is an extension of the Linux kernel. openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering. openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive. Once you have installed openMosix,
I think you can safely use "it" for all but the first "openMosix" in the article.
Otherwise it looks like a bad advertisement (try saying it aloud)...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive
Nothing like a 'perfectly' statement to discredit a story.
Don't blame me, I get all my opinions from my Ouija board.
There's already a mini-howto explaining how to set this up in combination with a Linux Terminal Server. Basically, you end up with a bunch of workstations that actually relieve the server from CPU load. Odd to think that the more diskless workstations you add to your network, the faster it becomes!
What's your damage, Heather?
This seems like a great technology for an enterprise to take advantage of older hardware. Upgrading your company's desktop PCs? Take the older ones and plug them into your openMosix cluster. If I recall correctly, processes can automatically migrate from node to node based on system load. I know my old had a Unix cluster for all of the CS students to use. It would get seriously bogged down at times, especially around finals. It'd be nice to have something like this which is able to take advantage of older hardware. There were times when a simple 'ls' would take 30 seconds to complete. Certainly this is something that an old 486 node could take care of.
Migrating live processes between boxes with open sockets is the last big obstacle to OpenMOSIX being used in large web farms, as far as I know. It seems that OpenMOSIX is geared more to scientific computation problems with IO only at the beginning or end of the batch job. If a MOSIX process has a lot of I/O, it stays on the same box and is never migrated.
The bit I am curious about is - if Mosix were GPL, and presumably contributed to by various of the now OpenMosix researchers, how did it become closed?
I have found This link, but that suggests a code fork rather than a revival-after-closing-source.
-=DaveHowe=-
OpenMosix is my best friend. I run several machines at home and I can tell you that openMosix rocks my world. I have a (gasp) Windows machine on my KVM switch that I use for playing games. When I am not using it, I run VMWare with a small Linux install and openMosix to take advantage of that machine's processor power. No point in letting it sit idle when I am working on my Linux machines.
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
Under some workloads, I can go along with the assertion that a MOSIX cluster is just like having a big machine with a lot of CPU's. It seems to be great for those workloads and I would love to try it out. Those loads tend to be multiple long running (more than a few seconds) and not multithreaded. For MOSIX to be most efficient, there also needs to be fewer jobs than there are CPUs to run them.
Other workloads, however, will not benefit from MOSIX. These statements are based on reading the docs a couple weeks back, not on actual experience.
Under the MOSIX model, when a process forks, the child may run on the current machine or it may migrate somewhere else. If the job is short lived (ls, echo whatever | sed s/blah/baz, you get the point) MOSIX will perform poorly because it will spend more time trying to figure out where the process should run than would have if it had just run the program on the local host.
If you need more CPU time than one CPU can provide and your program is multi-threaded, a single multiprocessor machine will also work better. This is because MOSIX does not yet support threads running on different machines. A 128-node cluster of 386's is going to run Netscape slower than a single 486 because you will only be using one 386 CPU.
For cases where you just have too many jobs for the resources available (CPU or memory), you may be better off with something like Condor. It is great for submitting batch jobs, migrating those jobs around, and only running the number of jobs that the system can handle.
Darn... I thought this said openMOSIS.
I don't think anyone would mind a sourceforge for chip building (especially free nightly builds!)
More on topic and to the point - it is good to see that MOSIX tech is now available opensource (stable anyway). Now we have yet another viable option for speeding up our Beowulfs (MOSIX is generally run with PVM/MPI - not as a replacement).
It appears Ockham lost his razor and grew a beard.
I tried (vanilla)mosix a while back. It was cool, but had some real world drawbacks. If you start a process on a node and that process opens a socket, opens a file, or uses shared memory, then that process is stuck on that node. So if you start 10 dnet processes on one node, they won't migrate to idle nodes because they have open sockets (to the key server).
I don't know if this is the case any longer, I heard rumor that all these things were going to be implimented, so it'll be an interesting project to watch.
Good Luck Open Mosix!
-The JungleBoy
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
What openMosix was openMosix the openMosix name openMosix of openMosix that openMosix project openMosix again?
Education is the silver bullet.
I have absolutely no use for clustered machines (my brother is the particle physicist), but I do happen to have a few pentium-class machines lying around my apartment. I'm just starting to learn about practical uses of linux in my home enviornment, and I'm wondering if I can use a Mosix cluster behind my switcher/firewall box on my DSL line.
If I want to set up apache and FTP access to my network, could I use a Mosix cluster to help distribute the load? Maybe I could use a mosix cluster to speed the rendering of video that I edit on my workstation somehow?
This stuff is just too cool to have absolutely no practical application in my life.
slash is open source. if it's simple, add it yourself. that's what this whole "open source" thing is about.
you can do this instead of sitting there waiting for sites to load.
actually, I'm curious. What is the practical upshot, since it's different from Beowulf?
(also: so how's this differ from Appleseed?)
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
...That could take advantage of such a clustering scheme. I am forced to endure MS SQL Server , it has failover clustering.
Look at what happened with SSH if you want similar example. If you are the original author (so the copyright is yours) of a GPL project then then you are perfectly entitled to produce a closed source version at some point in the future. It's other people who get the code via the GPL licence who are forced to keep it free.
What kind of experiments have people done with kernel compiles on an openMOSIX cluster? If you have 10 computers and do a "make -j 10", will you see a benefit?
World Beach List, my latest project.
There's a Mosix package in Debian. What is the difference between this project and the one that produced the Debian package?
Is socket migration on the OpenMosix TO DO list?
I have 27 old Pentium 200MMX computers on my carage and I tried this OpenMOSIX - I had a hard time believing my eyes when I realised how well it works! All I can say is that you gotta see it to understand how great it is! God I love Linux!
And it's fully buzzword compliant!
if I 'open mosix" 4 computers and leave each one as a graphical login terminal to open a gnome desktop, would it make for a "snappy" or fast desktop, or would the I/O slow it down. (asssume 100baseT ethenet)
if anyone has tried using a cluster for 'end user desktop apps' how does it work out fsater/slower/no diff?
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
The article says Web servers and DB servers do not run faster. I would rather know which apps, by name, run faster. After all isn't that why you create a cluster?
:(
From reading posts, it seems graphic rendering is faster. Darn, I'm interested in Web servers and Database servers
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
When are we going to see Mosix being worked on for FreeBSD. This is something that, the entire community could benefit from. Imaging processes migrating between Linux and BSD machines on the network. I know they have said they were working on it ... but I want to know when?
lim brain -> meltdown
In the begining, the Mosix project was for BSDs, but switched to linux, as it was percieved to be the more widespread kernel...
From the emails I swapped with the fellow in charge of the project (I'm going from memory, and this was towards the end of 1998), they really liked BSD, and all the code was written for the BSD kernel, but had, in the end, decided to rewrite for linux.
I was crushed, as I had just setup a nice small network of BSD machines (for bandwidth and QoS testing), and really wanted to try it... but, I got over it, and decided clustering wasn't going to address any of my issues anyway.
What I'd love to see with an applicatoin like this is clustered processing of video files, like DV or MPEG2 or MPEG4 files.
Or, render farms needed for those thousands of figures in battles in Lord of The Rings