On 4/20/05, Eran Tromer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The OpenMOSIX at Weizmann *does* work very well for applications that > were specifically rewritten with MOSIX in mind, such as custom > scientific computation C programs written by the institute's > researchers, and even some Matlab programs (if you're careful about
Being one of those who built Weizmann's OM cluster I thought I could add my 2cents. OM is not "anything you throw at it" type of thing. Certainly not. At least not in its kernel-2.4 family incarnation. On their website (openmosix.sf.net) they claim that OM is SSI type of cluster, but it's not in many aspects. Currently it can only migrate single treaded processes that do not make use of shared memory. ( I know, there is an "migshm" patch that is supposed to allow threaded, shared memory processes to migrate but after the cluster crashed a number of times with the patch enabled I decided to move away from it). Essentially that means that there are very few "off the shelf" apps that can take advantage of OM. Two outstanding examples we had here is Matlab and Java. both are threaded, make heavy use of shared memory. both either don't migrate and stick at the home node or, if run with threads disabled, suffer from degraded perfomance that defeats the whole purpose of having them on the cluster. On the good side, we have people here that had been running MPI enabled apps for extended period of time and it ran beautifully. A bunch of other people (students and researchers) at this exactly moment are loading 9 out of 12 nodes with various custom-tailored codes. As the admin I must also admit that OM installation is quite straightforward and it's a pleasure to maintain with feature rich and well laid out userland tools. I'm waiting impatiently to test OM release on kernel 2.6 when it will be out. Hope this helps. -- Warm regards, Michael Green ================================================================To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
