Hi, Just to clarify my last mail: the problems I mentioned are inherent to (Open)MOSIX. Our IT staff did a lot of work configuring and optimizing the system and fixed all that could be fixed (I know because I also looked at some of these problems myself), but it boils down to fundamental limitations of (Open)MOSIX.
So if you expect it to be "magic supercomputer" you'll end up disappointed; as Gilad said, if you have well-characterized and MOSIX-friendly workload, great. Otherwise, don't expect great success. Eran On 19/04/05 22:26, Eran Tromer wrote: > Hi, > > On 19/04/05 21:13, Gilad Ben-Yossef wrote: > >>MOSIX/OpenMOSIX is a great >>academic excersize - a working academic excersize, but not something I >>would use except for very specific and narrow taks in controled conditions. > > > That's consistent with my experience. Here at the Weizmann Institute, > the IT department built a MOSIX-based cluster out of a dozen high-end > machines. It failed miserably. AFAIK, the main problem was that > migration just never happened for most user processes (even after fixing > the default setup which disallows migration of anything invoked via ssh, > which wasn't documented anywhere). To start with, anything that used > shared memory and (IIRC) threads couldn't migrate. Also, anything that > did noticable amounts of I/O got locked to its home node, even though > everything was running on an NFS-mounted filesystem anyway [1]. Since > all processes on the cluster had the same home node (i.e., the formal > gateway to the cluster which everybody sshed to), they ended up having > one overloaded node and 11 nearly idle machines. > > Eran > > [1] In theory it might have been possible to work around that using the > distributed FS that comes with MOSIX/OpenMOSIX, but I wouldn't bet on > it. I wildly guess it would require a major migration and have some > funny stuff non-Unix semantics, and my general impression was that the > FS is half-baked. > > ================================================================= > 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] > > > ================================================================= 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]
