[Beowulf] Anyone use MOSIX?
hahn at physics.mcmaster.ca
Mon Feb 23 15:52:58 EST 2004
> Has anyone on this list used MOSIX before?
I expect many have given it a try.
> I'm particularly interested in how it compares to other clustering software
> such as PVM and MPI.
apples and oranges, I believe. mosix more or less tries to virtualize
a cluster by making multiple machines share things like a single pid space,
with forwarding of signals, etc. the idea is that the OS takes care of
migrating jobs across nodes, including using proxies for resources that can't
be directly moved (pages can, for instance).
from the PVM/MPI perspective, the most important resource would be sockets.
as far as I know, MPI-on-Mosix would use proxied sockets, and would therefore
have performance problems for anything closely-coupled or high-bandwidth.
in principle, Mosix could provide some sort of clusterized group-comm
mechanism that wouldn't require proxies, but that would be a large effort.
in a way, it's a shame that MPI is such a fat interface, since there's a lot
of really good work that could be done in this direction, but is simply too
large for a typical thesis project :(
regards, mark hahn.
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