Re: Mosix and traditional Beowulf software together (was Re: Mosix bundle)

[kragen@xxxxxxxxx (Kragen Sitaker)]

Brad asks:
> I am making a pitch for building a Beowulf, and I am wondering if I should
> mention Mosix.  From my cursory look at their WWW page, it seemed that if
> you were using Mosix on a cluster, it would not be possible to also use
> MPI/PVM and other packages that treat the cluster as a big set of machines.
> 
> I would like to have both Mosix and traditional MPI/PVM applications at the
> same time.  I think this would be a big sell to the faculty at my
> University.  Can anyone comment on the feasibility of doing this and what the
> caveats would be?

From my understanding of MOSIX, you can definitely treat a MOSIX
cluster as a group of separate machines.  But if you're not careful,
your jobs may get migrated to other nodes, which may not be a win.
MOSIX has a syscall (in Linux, apparently a /proc entry) that lets you
flag a particular process as "not to be migrated".

I haven't downloaded MOSIX yet.  If I am lucky, I will have the
opportunity to play with installing it on some cluster and playing with
it.

-- 
<kragen@xxxxxxxxx>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
TurboLinux is outselling NT in Japan's retail software market 10 to 1,
so I hear. 
-- http://www.performancecomputing.com/opinions/unixriot/981218.shtml