On Wed, 18 Jun 2003, [ISO-8859-1] Jos� Manuel Canelas wrote: > Greetings. > > As a newbie to the mainframe environment (my background is mostly linux), I have > grown enthusiastic about this superior hardware I knew very little about. > Nevertheless, I have always found it a shame that number crunching workloads are not > a good match to the mainframe. > > Grid computing is interesting as a way to make the best of the cheap computing power > provided by intel boxes, on the one hand, and the robustness of the mainframe, on > the other, opening new avenues for integrating and using various resources with > their own strenghts. If i got it right, it seems that applications need to be > grid-aware to be able to use it effectively, which makes it a no-no as a short-term > solution. > > And then I had this idea when I was reading about openMosix. > For those of you who haven't heard, check the homepage at > http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/. > In a nutshell, openMosix is a single-image clustering system implemented as a Linux > kernel extension and a set of userland tools. You connect multiple IA-32 boxes with > a patched kernel and get a linearly scalable cheap supercomputer. Users treat it > like a single machine, as processes are migrated to idle(ier) nodes transparently. > > So what if we could patch a zLinux image kernel and then made it one of the nodes of > one of these clusters? If possible, we would have a way to cleanly offload CPU > intensive jobs from the linux/mainframe to cheaper external engines. > > This would get cheap horsepower to the mainframe, transparently, and would still > allow for centralized management (filesystems could still reside on DASD). I can > think of at least one disadvantage. If an external node breaks, any processes it is > running at the moment will be lost, which wouldn't happen on a zLinux image, as far > as I know. > > Any mainframe and VM gurus care to comment? Is there any reason why this can't be > done? Do we loose any more reliability features? Am I missing something that makes > it totally impractical? >
<chuckle> Instruction sets, integer formats, address formats, addressing modes all conspire against you. Mozix and openmozix are only usable on machines with the same architecture. Conceivably you could use either on S/390, but all members of the cluster would have to be S/390 (or zBoxes pretending to be S/390). > Thanks for your patience :) We all have something to cause us to blush when we recall them. This is one for your;-) ROTFLOL > > -- jmc > -- Cheers John. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb
