clustering + Openmosix

kurrupt · n00b Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 18

hello everyone, i do large jobs that need alot of CPU power like video editing and stuff (yes all within linux

)

and i heard about openmosix and how it can cluster PCs together and compute 1 or more jobs, which is amazing.. i thought there wasnt such thing for free lol but anyways.. i was on gentoo's site and they have a section on setting up a cluster "http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/openmosix-howto.xml"

now i was trying to read up on this and i seem have a hard time gasping it, but this howto is just showing me how to setup a node ? how are the computers going to know where these nodes are and to send the process information back and forth.. ? is there another thing i have to do to make the pc's (the ones who issue the jobs) to see these nodes, to use there CPU ?

If anyone can help me out that would be just great

Thank you in advance.

Janne Pikkarainen · Posted: Sun Oct 09, 2005 6:34 am Post subject:

OpenMosix is pretty much a plug 'n play cluster. All the nodes run a small daemon, which discovers all the other OpenMosix nodes from your local network and joins them together.

OpenMosix can also be setup manually and it can be advised ("this program is supposed to be I/O bound", "this program is supposed to be cpu bound"), but basically it automatically sets itself up.
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shrimp123 · Apprentice Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 199 Location: Here!

I have a openmosix cluster of 4 machines running seamlessly for a monthe now.....

some points

1. if u expect a faster single job, this is not it.
2. it is useful ONLY if you have multiple jobs that launched on one machine "benefit" from migrating to another
3. if you use advanced fs like, afs, coda, etc, .... its a pain to get them to work. i have afs mounted... but coda is a differnt story
4. one thing that i have an issue (which might be easy to solve, but i dont know) is how to control migration. here is an example.... say i launch 4 jobs... each taking 10 seconds. the migration process depends on the network b/w and processor load,. now this means that it spends time migrating... while it could have finished locally long before

. there could be a "migration latency" that i have not played with....

if you want the .config, etc, i can send it over.

thanks,
Shrimp

kurrupt · n00b Joined: 26 May 2005 Posts: 18

shrimp123, if you can that would be great!

I dont just do 1 job in most cases its 4-6 at the same time which takes alot of cpu so this would be great. The only "1" job i do is masive compiling ie: emerge so i use discc.

So really.. every computer must be running openmosix to be part of the pool.. even the PC that will be doing all the process issuing?