Lukasz Sokol wrote:
On 26/02/16 10:20, Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote:
[the history of OpenMOSIX, really good writeup, thanks!]
For me what dragged me to OpenMOSIX was that, unlike Beowulf,
it did not require to recompile any programs it was to run,
with some nifty special libraries. And the members of the cluster
still are usable machines.
Back in uni, in 2004, I attempted to create a lab environment,
with OpenMOSIX booted off couple of CD's of remastered Knoppix, on 4 computers,
running Octave for extensively used Matlab-like calculations,
since some people only could be bothered running Matlab or alikes.
When it did run, it ran well.
Enough for the members of the exam panel to be convinced anyway.
It would also run with graphical programs (you probably know that since
you mention Octave), provided that they only used OS facilities (i.e. no
direct hardware access) and didn't use shared memory. That last is a
killer as far as things like Mozilla/Firefox are concerned, I've got a
colleague who keeps a lot of browser instances open for extended periods
but since each one uses a block of shared memory to coordinate multiple
windows it's not possible to spread the load. I've ended up setting him
up a big AMD system, and it's interesting comparing its memory
management performance with the slightly smaller Sun he was using until
recently: different flavours of Linux kernel behave very differently.
The sort of thing that interested me was the case where somebody had
PDA-type programs running on a portable system ("Minnie") which could
offload work to something more capable ("Mike") when its owner got home
and docked it (wireless doesn't really work here, since connections have
to be broken fairly carefully). However that obviously mandates that all
cooperating systems are binary-compatible, unless this sort of thing is
reengineered using e.g. Java (I'm sure somebody has by now) and that all
required apps are available (more of an issue).
I think it does rather more than the virtualised etc. systems which are
so popular these days, and is in practice much closer to some of the
classic IBM mainframe OSes which could distribute work over sysplexes-
which is probably why Moshe Barr is seen in some of the IBM foramina.
RIP, there's no equivalent replacement on PCs (which probably suits IBM
fine).
--
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk
[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]
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