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Mosix now GPLed
Az0th writes "Prof. Amnon Barak posted today to the Mosix list
an announcement that the Mosix distribution is now
under GPL. See the story for details. "
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Hmm, not sure if I want to do this...
Picked it up earlier today, before I found out it was news!
A mirror of the source is on http://dougal.chu.cam.ac.uk/mosix/
After all the bitching that the (mostly AC portion of) community has been doing about Big Bad Evil MOSIX violating the poor innocent GPL, I think quite a few folks owe these guys an apology.
Not at all. Had we not done all that bitching, MOSIX probably would not have been GPLed. We do owe them a congratulations and a thank-you, now that they've done the right thing (and I know I'll be e-mailing them both).
Once again, the 'viral' GPL proves its worth in bringing us great source code. This will help the MOSIX project too -- the more people able to see/use/improve this source code, the better this type of clustering on Linux will get (and the greater the fame of the Hebrew University as its developers/maintainers). Once Redhat starts selling MOSIX/Linux distros, cheap clustering will be available for anyone, and it will be another nail in the coffin for NT.
I wonder how they got around the Israeli government's export restrictions? My understanding was that *this* was the main reason MOSIX wasn't GPLed in the first place.
A (formerly) bitchin' AC
Some /.'ers seems to think about people or companies in terms of "good" or "bad". Other ./'ers don't think of people or companies that way, instead they think of _behaviours_ as good or bad.
When people or companies like Linus or Microsoft are consistently behaving good or bad, this distinction doesn't cause any problems.
However, as Cowards Anonymous demonstrated, when someone _change_ behaviour, this cause some confusion. For CA, the new "good" behaviour proves that the Mosix people where "good" all along, and therefore think an apology from the people who complained about the previous "bad" behaviour is appropriate. However, no such apology is to be expected, because the new "good" behaviour doesn't affect the status of the old "bad" behaviour.
This is the same problem some people got when Troll Tech changed to an Open Source(TM) complaint license.
To be honest, I think the tendency to divide people (and companies) into good or bad are a sign of immaturity. A world-view created by Hollywood. Companies in a market economy just tries to make money, and people tend to do what they believe are right. Judge behaviours instead.
It's a different thing. MOSIX is effectively SMP over a network (yes I know it's not exactly the same, but hey.) whereas Beowulf is a message-passing system. The idea of Beowulf is to allow a single dataset to be worked on by processes running on several different machines, and applications have to be specially written. The upshot is, one application running fast.
The idea of MOSIX is that you have one big kernel distributed over a lot of boxes (rather than SMP, which is just distributed over a lot of CPUs in one box). So a single thread can still only run on one CPU. But if you have lots of processes you want to run on one machine, or a heavily multithreaded process, then MOSIX is ideal.
Of course, for lots of things you don't need either of these systems. If you can divide your data set up at the start of the task then 1/nth of the set can be processed on each single-processor machine. This is more or less how things like distributed.net work, with no need for MOSIX or Beowulf or PVM or any special system.
axolotl
Nick
-- "It's a sad day for American capitalism when a man can't fly a midget on a kite over Central Park" - Jim Moran
Just to inform you, they're still looking for sponsors for maintenance and further development (eg. network RAM). Hm, the great Linux distributions tend to spend money on stuff like that - would certainly be a good idea ....
http://metalab.unc.edu/LDP/HOWTO/Parallel-Processi ng-HOWTO.html
It goes trough a lot of the issues involved, hardware, suitable tasks and existing solutions.
just the archive, no docs or anything
If you are considering building a cluster, I would highly recommend you check out MOSIX. I've used it in the past, and it works very well. The ability to migrate a running process from one box to another is just cool ;) I'm glad to see it's available once again and I can finally upgrade my kernel and still have MOSIX support.
I am pretty much a Linux newbie, but from what i understand, a piece of software must be specifically written (or patched) in order to work effectively with Beowulf. Mosix seems to allow any process (regardless of how it was written) to effectively use the distributed resources of the system. IMO, this would make a MOSIX cluster easier to work with (from a coding standpoint). Is this correct, or am I reading things wrong?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
What is Mosix, you ask? From their web page:
MOSIX is a software tool for supporting cluster computing. The core of MOSIX are
kernel-level, adaptive load-balancing and memory ushering algorithms that are geared
for maximal performance, overhead-free scalability and ease-of-use of a scalable
computing cluster. These algorithms are designed to respond to variations in the
resource usage among the nodes by migrating processes from one node to another,
preemptively and transparently. MOSIX provides some SMP/NUMA functionalities in
order to allow a cluster of PCs (workstations and servers) to work cooperatively as if
part of a single system.