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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."
FTA: "Moshe Bar, openMosix founder and project leader, has announced plans to end the openMosix Project effective March 1, 2008."
Wikipedia: Moshe is founder of the company behind the Xen software, XenSource, Inc. Moshe is also founder of the company Qumranet which is behind the development of the KVM virtualization technology in the Linux kernel.
Looks like Moshe is to busy for that old fashioned mosix stuff...
The big thing I'd add is that all of the high performance clusters I've seen don't use Mosix (open or otherwise). The reason is that while mosix makes some administration tasks easier, it doesn't address the single most important thing for a HPC cluster: Performance.
The point of mosix is to avoid using a library (such as an MPI implementation) to handle parallel apps, and to make managing a cluster 'easier'.
The problem is that the performance just isn't there, and that the 'industry' as a whole has overall chosen to use MPI to handle parallelism, and use various other methods to manage the cluster.
Bottom line: The industry they targeted didn't move in the direction mosix was headed (which is exactly why the developers are shutting it down).
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
I do highly parallel processing. The industry as a whole has moved in a different direction (which is, oddly enough one of the reasons the project is shutting down). We use MPI, which is one of the things that mosix was supposed to let you avoid. There are other ways to maintain a system than the "single system image." Mosix had problems with performance, which is an effective way to ensure it won't be used in high performance applications.
And it's no fun to develop something you know isn't going to be used, as the supercomputing 'industry' isn't moving in the same direction that Mosix was heading.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.