[Beowulf] Re: MOSIX2

[Tony Travis]

Vincent Diepeveen wrote:
> I agree tony that paying for such crap is not very good idea.

Hello, Vincent.

I don't think MOSIX2 is crap!

However, I don't like the idea of having to pay for 'updates'.

> You might want to move to open-ssi in this case; the project is alive 
> and there is in theory work getting
> performed on support for cards over infiniband as well.

I have looked at OpenSSI, which uses the openMosix load-balancer, but 
process migration is more coarsely grained than in openMosix. Only the 
active pages of the user context of openMosix processes are migrated.

I've been looking at alternatives and I think Kerrighed looks very 
promising but, in our hands, Kerrighed is very fragile: I've mentioned 
on this list before that if one Kerrighed node goes down you lose the 
entire cluster. We've been talking to Christine Morin's group at INRIA 
and they tell us that the next release of Kerrighed with be more robust:

	http://www.kerrighed.org

> Most importantly is that you are gonna get more replies.

Yes, thanks for yours :-)

> Additionally the manner open-ssi implements shared memory is very 
> transparant; in principle on each write it migrates a page
> to the node writing.
> 
> Maybe the only big lack of open-ssi is its limited support so far for 
> highend network cards.

What bothers me about OpenSSI is that it's based on an open-sourced 
version HP's (now Compaq) discontinued commercial product "non-stop 
clusters for Unix". The OpenSSI project also came in for a lot of 
criticism from the openMosix community for stealing ideas, so my 
concerns about it might not be all that well founded ;-)

The main reason I didn't use OpenSSI, previously, was that many features 
had not been implemented fully and, like Kerrighed, it wasn't really a 
viable option for a 'production' cluster even though it was interesting 
as a research project. What makes me take MOSIX2 seriously now is that 
it is a commercially supported 'product' with all the same virtues (and 
most of the vices) of openMosix.

	Tony.
-- 
Dr. A.J.Travis, University of Aberdeen, Rowett Institute of Nutrition
and Health, Greenburn Road, Bucksburn, Aberdeen AB21 9SB, Scotland, UK
tel +44(0)1224 712751, fax +44(0)1224 716687, http://www.rowett.ac.uk
mailto:ajt at rri.sari.ac.uk, http://bioinformatics.rri.sari.ac.uk/~ajt