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openMosix Is Shutting Down
jd writes "Despite having one of the largest user-bases of any clustering system for Linux, openMosix is to be shut down. Top developers have left and they lack the means or motivation to continue. Their official claim of multicore CPUs making clustering redundant is somewhere between highly improbable and totally absurd, as has been pointed out elsewhere. Why is this shutdown so important? Well, from a technical standpoint, the open-source bproc (the Beowulf process migration module) is ancient, MOSIX is very hard to obtain unless you're a student, and kerrighd is (as yet) immature. From a user standpoint, openMosix is the mainstay of the Open Source clustering world and has by far the best management tools of any. The ability of this project to continue will likely have a major impact on the future of Open Source in the high-end markets — if the best of the best couldn't survive, people will be more careful about anything less."
There's a similar project named 'Open Single System Image'
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ssic-linux
I agree, there's a degree of optimism in my argument but the summary is plain flawed.
Its message and tone is that openMosix = dead, openMosix = OSS, therefore openMosix dying = OSS solutions are bad.
What it completely fails to address is that the situation would be no better, and in fact would be a lot worse, if this was a CSS tool. Indeed, the ray of light for openMosix users comes from the fact that it is OSS.
Bashing OSS solutions because one is dead/dying/in limbo/whichever way you want to look at it is patently ridiculous because it's not the openness of the code that's at fault here, or even the open source development model.
To put it bluntly, CSS projects that lose their core development teams don't exactly fair any better do they?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
The pendulum has swung back now. In the days when 10Mbps ethernet came onto the scene and our processors could barely keep up with their floopy drives (which is why a floppy used DMA), we collectively came up with the idea of using several computers to solve a problem by splitting the problem up among them. Since then thanks to Moore's law our processors now spend a lot of time waiting to fetch the next instruction from their on-chip L1 cache - as in when there's a miscalculation in the branch prediction step.
Our networks however have not kept up to this pace. Right now our very best effort for network speed is infiniband which tops out at 96Gbps theoretical limit. The AMD Opteron page lists a limit of 24GBps, that's 192Gbps, bandwidth using three coherent hypertranport processors. See the problem?
I see one of two things happening, either we'll find a magic bullet technology to significantly increase our network speeds; or some limit will finally end Moore's law. Otherwise there's simply no reason to tie together multiple processors. Despite Windows best efforts, our CPU's still spend most of their time waiting for something to do.
Dennis Dumont
The article summary was certainly an eye grabber... but, the truth is, I've deployed quite a few linux HA and load balancing clusters. I have also installed a couple openMosix clusters. While it may be sad that openMosix is closing, the vast majority of clustering cannot be handled by openMosix. It is designed as a parallel processing cluster. I would say 99% of clusters are of the HA/load balancing variety. IE, I've got 3 web servers and I want to distribute the load between them. openMosix cannot do this, it isn't designed for it. Or I have 5 DB servers and I want to distribute load/perform replication. again openMosix does not do this. It is a "processing" cluster. IE I have this huge data set, and an application which will split up that data set and do some processing on it. Think SETI@home except, you don't want to send it to people's homes, you just want to run a single process which will send jobs off to other nodes for computing. The only thing I ever successfully used openMosix for was a compile cluster, and for that it was nice, but even for regularly compiling KDE, it wasn't much worth the effort to get the cluster running for the time it saved in compiling.
At the time I used it it couldn't migrate web server processes or db server processes, so it was useless for what I do most of the time.
Well, let me precise the announce :
...
...
The project will be shut down in March 2008, not before.
actually, it's Moshe only who will stop "leading" the project (as a reminder, he didn't really 'lead' many thing in the 2.6 version)
After march, we will see who will get the 'leader' position, but I don't think that is really an important change (call that politics if you want). The fact is for now, oM 2.6 has 3 core devs (me, risc, and g4saa) and we are quite all busy elsewhere. Anyway, if I can make interesting progress this year on the oM2.6 code, I'll take over the project.
Don't fear, oM project is not yet buried
Anyhow, if any of you guys feel like kernel/user cluster dev, please feel free to contact me (or the list directly, I'll answer it)
WE NEED MORE DEVS !! (as always anyway).