at http://www.openmosix.org there's a very interesting development. openmosix is pretty nice for some applications (mainly long running jobs which don't use threads or shared memory).
it's not that useful for kernel compiles unless combined with distcc (in which case, it doesn't seem necessary to have the overhead of openmosix, really, distcc works very well by itself for large compiles). but back to the interesting development. a group of indian college students (and all female, which is worthy of mention, if only because of the well known male-female ratio in geekdom) have developed migShm (http://mcaserta.com/maask/) which is a distributed shared memory patch for openmosix. uh, mikhail, i remember you were working on a distributed programming project involving shared memory or something. would this be interesting or related? migShm is still being tested (there seem to be problems with X, and some other things) but if the testing and debugging goes well, it might go into openMosix. it'll be a great feature, since a lot of programs that use shared memory would then be migratable (e.g., postgresql's postmaster uses shared memory and isn't migratable, i think). the next big challenge will be threads. if threads could be migratable under openmosix, you'd have most of the features necessary for fully general purpose single system image clustering. there'd still be a need for very high performance MPI or PVM multiprocessing. but for the masses, openMosix would be easy, entry level clustering. it's useful enough now, but the shared memory and threads limitations are important enough that it's useful but not really satisfying yet. wouldn't it be cool if a bunch of talented filipino college kids (and, sure, a bunch of untalented other people along for the ride and for gracing the photo op :). were to work on the threads patch? then you'd have an SSI clustering system originally developed by israelis, enhanced and made more generally useful by east indians and filipinos :). moshe bar says that openMosix has produced quite a few PhDs. i figure there are several more PhDs there for those who want to work on thread migration, or, at any rate, on making programs that use linux threads or pthreads migrate on openMosix. it'd be *really* cool if individual threads could live on different PCs, but that's probably asking too much of the technology, and performance would probably suffer too much (imagine the performance hit and race conditions on a multi threaded java program with lots of synchronization and with the threads running on different computers :) . but it'd be a reasonable first cut at the problem to have threaded programs be capable of migrating (all the threads together). tiger -- Gerald Timothy Quimpo gquimpo*hotmail.com tiger*sni*ph http://bopolissimus.sni.ph Public Key: "gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 672F4C78" Life is not fair, and if you think it is, you are wrong. Margaret Thatcher -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
