Uses for a beowulf cluster?

[A.J. Rossini]

Shachar Tal <shachar@vipe.technion.ac.il> writes:

> Transparent load sharing is exactly what I need. But I want a bit more. I
> want process migration, I want lastlog to be unified, etc. I don't need
> *anything* to run in parallel (not that it wouldn't be nice to have
> this), but I prefer the following scenario: each user logs in to a random
> (for the argument's sake) node, and does his work there. No interaction is
> needed for most of the work (pine, gcc, mathematica, flex, yacc, etc.),
> maybe sharing memory would be fine, but I suspect swapping pages to a
> local hard drive is a bit less expensive than shared memory across a
> 100Mb/s network.

You might look at MOSIX, which sounds like it will satisfy your needs.
Not prime-time for Linux, last I heard, but runs well on BSDI boxes
(so you need a site license -- but still reasonable, considering that
it's a decent OS for commodity hardware).

best,
-tony


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A.J. Rossini			
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