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OpenMosix 146

Posted by Hemos from the mosixing-the-night-away dept.
Francesco Taurino writes "Moshe Bar has released a new Mosix system: openMosix. From the site: "For thousands of users Mosix has been a reliable, fast and cost efficient clustering platform. There are hundreds of Mosix installations in life sciences, finance, industry, high tech, research and government environments. The goal of openMosix is to give to these users a continued support and an up-to-date platform. openMosix is initially fully compatible with the last Mosix (1.5.2 for 2.4.13) kernel, but is now growing in its own direction. If you would like to contribute to the openMosix project, drop a line to moshe@openmosix.org.""
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OpenMosix More

OpenMosix

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  • OpenVMS and clustering (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ASyndicate ( 159990 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @10:43AM (#2993876) Homepage
    OpenVMS [compaq.com] has the most robust, and fastest clustering ability I have ever seen . I just cant wait until linux can do this.

  • From the Mosix home page:
    Only Prof. Amnon Barak is authorized to represent MOSIX.

    ...???

    What's the story here, Moshe?

    • Re:Simple question: Why the split? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by VP ( 32928 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:00AM (#2993965)
      Follow the link: About openMosix [openmosix.com]

      After a difference of opinions on the commercial future of Mosix, I have started a new clustering company - Qlusters, Inc. - and Prof. Barak has decided not to participate for the moment in this venture (although he did seriously consider joining) and held long running negotiations with investors. It appears that Mosix is not any longer supported openly as a GPL project. Because there is a significant user base out there (about 1000 installations world-wide), I have decided to continue the development and support of the Mosix project under a new name, openMosix under the full GPL2 license. Whatever code in openMosix comes from the old Mosix project is Copyright 2002 by Amnon Bark. All the new code is copyright 2002 by Moshe Bar.
  • Imagine a beowolf cluster of these!!

    Oh yeah, this is mosix, bummer.

  • This is great... I think (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GigsVT ( 208848 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @10:59AM (#2993957) Journal
    I just finished implementing my 6 node MOSIX cluster, and I ran across several bugs, and I couldn't find any place to report them. The MOSIX development list is closed subscription, and apparently the good Professor ignores his email.

    I'm not clear about some things though... How is MOSIX currently licensed? Why are they being so closed about development?

  • 1.5.2 isn't latest MOSIX (Score:3, Informative)

    by NicolaiBSD ( 460297 ) <spam@van d e r s m a gt.nl> on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:01AM (#2993971) Homepage
    MOSIX 1.5.7 for Linux 2.4.17 (K-MOSIX) [freshmeat.net] is out, according to Freshmeat. Therefore "the last Mosix (1.5.2 for 2.4.13) kernel" seems incorrect.
  • I was thinking about building a mosix cluster, just to see how it works :)

    Anyone have some good links for a howto? Or anyone want to share their experience?

    • Re:Building a mosix cluster (Score:4, Informative)

      by Hamshrew ( 20248 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:36AM (#2994144) Homepage
      I don't have a link handy, as it's been a few months. I found it to be fairly simple to install... I had 4 PIII machines, set them all up on an internal network and nfs mounted a directory from the head. From there, it was a simple series of steps:

      Unpack kernel sources.
      Run the Mosix install script.

      Did that on each node, then started the mosix service on each.

      It worked like a charm for large computations, but had three flaws for normal use.

      1) By default, it does not auto-migrate, which was pretty dumb. And getting it to auto-migrate was buried deep in the docs, though it could be guessed from reading up on locks. (echo 1 > /proc/self/lock, I think it was)

      2) Migration only occurrs after a certain load average is maintained... if your job involves spawning multiple short-lived processes, like a large compile, it doesn't migrate anyway.

      3) Network usage for migration was very heavy over Fast Ethernet.

      There you have it. It's the last reason that MOSIX isn't used often in commercial clusters, but it seems well-suited for other distributed computing applications, and has some interesting features, especially for NOW configurations.

      • 1) By default, it does not auto-migrate

        Hmmm, maybe that is why it all of a sudden started working when I re-installed it. Anyway, I highly recomend MosixView [www.mosixview.com] for Mosix Administration. It is a effective but simple way to monitor and adjust your cluster.

        2) Migration only occurrs after a certain load average is maintained

        I believe that is what Prof Amnon is using for developing U-Mosix. From the home www.mosix.org page...

        "U-MOSIX provides even load distribution using several of the algorithms of K-MOSIX. U-MOSIX is better tuned for cluster and GRID computing, including the ability to handle large number of short processes, run in heterogeneous clusters, with different versions of Unix such as FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris."

        For those of us that don't want to wait for U-Mosix for grid-computing (also known as cluster queueing) I suggest Sun's Open Sourced Grid Ware Engine [sun.com]. It comes complete with a Beowulf Cluster built in.

        3) Network usage for migration was very heavy over Fast Ethernet.

        Actually, we haven't noticed much of a load at all.

        Btw, we are a commercial cluster ;)
    • IBM's developerWorks has a tutorial for installing mosix with kernel 2.4.13 which i did last night with great success.

      http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/
  • What a stupid name. Makes me think of squirrels for some reason =P

    • Re:Qlusters (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "What a stupid name. Makes me think of squirrels for some reason =P"

      You are probably thinking of that cereal commerical where a squirrel is chasing this guy trying to get his "cluster of oats" cereal.

  • I never heard of mosix, (Score:4, Informative)

    by whovian ( 107062 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:04AM (#2993987)
    and since information is a bit lacking at the link provided, here's [mosix.org] a link to the regular mosix FAQ.
  • Does anyone else get a hard-on when they look at stuff like http://www.mosix.org/pics/index.html [mosix.org] this?? OMG. I wish I had 40 boxes in my basement to do my evil bidding. Mwhahaha...

  • I hope.. (Score:2, Funny)

    by saqmaster ( 522261 )

    .. that the Mosix site is running on a Mosix cluster to withstand the slashdot affect :)

  • Why the fork... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Raleel ( 30913 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:10AM (#2994008)
    I guess I wanna know why there was a fork. I respect both the big Prof and Moshe from what I have read of theirs. Moshe says that Mosix is going in other directions, which sounds kinda...vague ;)

    • Re:Why the fork... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by crome ( 204387 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @11:48AM (#2994219) Homepage
      Well, Prof. Barak did not release any new versions until this morning (after my announcement). He closed off the mailing list and bulletin board. He complained to me repeatedly about the GPL and that he was going to close off Mosix and that Linus is a fool.

      In the mosix website they speak about going to user-space, which is probably being done to avoid the GPL.

      Just ask yourself, if they had Mosix for 2.4.17 (they released it soon after my openMosix, so it must have been there all along) ready, why didn't Prof. Barak give it to the user-community?

      That's what I mean they are going proprietary.

      Moshe Bar
      • He closed off the mailing list and bulletin board.
        Ok...that's not a great sign..

        He complained to me repeatedly about the GPL
        There are other licenses out there. Prof. Barak himself I suppose would ahve to answer what his issues with the GPL are. I wrote to him a while back and got the impression that he was not interested in the GPL

        that Linus is a fool
        If that's a quote, I've really lost respect for him. Linus is certainly not a fool.

        In the mosix website they speak about going to user-space, which is probably being done to avoid the GPL.
        While this is a possible outcome, this is a bit of fear-mongering...

        Just ask yourself, if they had Mosix for 2.4.17 (they released it soon after my openMosix, so it must have been there all along) ready, why didn't Prof. Barak give it to the user-community?
        actually, my first thought was that whomever hadn't gotten it to work with the new VM code, not that he was withholding it.

        I guess my thought it is...He has the right to, I suppose. I'm glad that someone is taking it and keeping it not proprietary. It has the potential in some areas that I work with.

      • forgot to say thanks for replying ;)
      • I think the fork is the greatest news to happen to the distributed/parallel computing community. Mosix has the potential to bring distributed computing to the masses; however, updates were slow to come, the mailing list is down as of December 2001, and it was beginning to look like Mosix was dying.

        I for one, hope that the OpenMosix project moves forward, and makes quick and timely releases. I would like to see an openMosix for 2.4.17 and the upcoming 2.4.18! Great work guys!

      • I attended a lecture by Prof. Barak in Edinburgh sometime ago (so this next bit is fuzzy), but this is as I understand it;

        Mosix started as a means of building high performance computing facilities, in the face of the export ban of HPC machines out of the US. It wasn't built to provide an excellent open clustering system, but to provide HPC facilites to University of (? Lebanon ?). I wouldn't be surprised if the military were involved. But certainly, it's been the University that's been paying the bills as it were, and so they'll have some (considerable, I suspect) say in what's going on.

        Professor Barak struck me as a man very devoted to his work (he did give us a lecture in Edinburgh, after all), so don't diss him too readily.

        This was all a while ago mind you, things may well have changed (drastically) since then.

      • He complained to me repeatedly about the GPL and that he was going to close off Mosix and that Linus is a fool.
        This sounds more like bitterness. A wild guess: maybe the Prof. was "turned down" by Linus when he asked for mosix to be added in the kernel-tree? If the Prof was really going proprietary, why would he release Mosix to the public after your statement?

        Can't look inside his head from a distance, but calling someone a fool is not something that pops up in ones mind. After you announced the fork, maybe his bitterness was over come by his pride about Mosix...

        ohwell, just my 2 cents. Hope that the Prof now becomes resonable, joining forces would be more productive than working seperated...

  • what happens if a node in a mosix cluster dies? i've hunted through the docs to no avail.
    • Well, one would imagine that all processes hosted on that node, and all processes homed on that node (that is, originally launched on that node) die, while the remaining part of the cluster continues to run undisturbed.
      I'm not sure, it just seems reasonable.
    • Nothing. The cluster will live on, because it is actually a peer-to-peer system (not client/server). This is in the docs somewhere.

      However, if a node dies abruptly, the job may be lost (I'm not sure here, because it hasn't happened to me yet). Logically, the submitting node should see that the node has died and should re-submit to a good node. Anyone have a difinitive answer on this?

    • We run Mosix, and have had jobs fail. If a node goes down that is running a process two things can (and have) happened. The process dies, or it restarts on another node. What determins this? I have no idea. I can only speak from observation.

      It is suggested in the documentation that you have a large swap space on your disk to handle nodes going down. Perhaps with a cached copy of a process it will live on.

      In any case, its not scientific but I thought I'd throw that in.
  • Well, I wanted to read the FAQ to find out what Mosix was, exactly, but apparently you have to be an admin to get to the FAQ. That sucks.
    • Yeah, I had that happen to me earlier, causing me to find the regular mosix FAQ. Try the openmosix FAQ again -- it works now, but it seems to be aimed at people in-the-know.
  • I am just wondering if applications need to be specifically written for MOSIX like they do for PVM?

    If not, I may just have to try this one :)
    • No, and that's the beauty of MOSIX. You don't even have to recompile! And forking apps will fork over the cluster as well.

      This is not to say that you can't run PVM or MPI on top of MOSIX. In fact, IIRC, MPI actually runs BETTER when used in conjunction with MOSIX (???) Anyone have any hard numbers here?
      • iirc, there are papers on the mosix websites which show performace grpahs of either pvm or mpi with and without a mosix cluster. pvm (or mpi) indeed ran better with a mosix cluster.

        then again, i might have read it in the mosix book (details on their homepage) or heard it in one of prof. barak's lecture.

      • From my brief experimentation with Mosix and a bit of reading, this sounds correct.

        Basically, mosix is a very "chunky" sort of clustering - it works on the level of "whole processes". Because of this, you don't need to write your software to do the splitting and migrating yourself as you do with "less chunky" pvm and mpi. On the other hand, a process split off from a pvm program running can be handled by mosix like any other process and migrated to the cpu that mosix thinks can get the process finished fastest.

        Mosix seems like an ideal way to 'lend' processing power to slower machines. This is what I was doing when I played with it previously - I had a K6/2-350 and a P-100 laptop with no L2 cache. I got Mosix set up on them both and used a command-line mp3 encoder as a benchmark. On the P-100, encoding speed was about 15% of realtime. On the K6/2, it was about 110%. Running Mosix between the two over 10Mb Ethernet, I could encode mp3 at about 85% - I suspect it'd have been significantly closer to 100% if I'd had 100Mb Ethernet at the time...

        Hopefully OpenMosix will keep up with current kernel versions better. Better still, maybe they'll be able to get it merged into 2.5 at some point...

  • FAQ from Website (Score:3, Informative)

    by lw54 ( 73409 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @12:21PM (#2994411)
    Before it gets slashdotted by everyone trying to figure out WTF OpenMosix is, here's the FAQ from their website.

    Can I mix Mosix and openMosix nodes in the same cluster?

    No. Just like the older Mosix, you should not mix nodes because the protocols are subject to un-announced changes from version to version. On top of that, every new version has bug fixes which warrant updating to the new kernels.

    Whois the copyright holder of openMosix?

    All the old Mosix code is copyright by Prof. Amnon Barak of Hebrew University of Jerusalem. All new code of openMosix is copyright 2002 by Moshe Bar, Tel Aviv.

    How do I upgrade to openMosix?

    openMosix maintains for now compatibility with the user-land tools of Mosix 1.5.2. I also have a port to openMosix of the user-land tools which will be released soon. To upgrade to openMosix, simply download the openMosix patch from www.openmosix.org and apply the patch with

    patch -Np1 < openMosix1.5.2moshe

    to a stock Linux kernel of 2.4.14 or 2.4.16 respectively. Make sure to get your old .config file (the .config file remains compatible) and recompile your kernel and modules. Then, reboot.

    Is openMosix a fork of Mosix?

    Right now, it is a pure fork. Eventually, it will become a separate clustering platform with its own distinct feature set and behaviour.

  • As far as I can tell, MOSIX is still freely downloadable from mosix.com [mosix.org]. However, the statement on the download page does seem kind of odd (you acknowledge "THAT MOSIX IS THE PROPERTY OF AMNON BARAK").

    I really appreciate the work that Barak has done with and on Mosix. But I also find it kind of odd that Mosix could be the "property" of one individual. I would assume that it was developed with public research grants and while the author was employed at a university. Graduate students probably have also contributed, and there probably have been bug fixes as well. So, maybe it isn't bad if there is a GPL'ed distribution of Mosix after all. The GPL regulates issues of ownership rather well.

    As for a user-space implementation of Mosix, I think that makes sense, although it has its drawbacks as well. One of the problems with user-space implementations is that they tend to be less than transparent in practice. It also strikes me as somewhat redundant, since Condor has already gone the user space route. A userland Mosix would only make sense if it were free and open source (as opposed to Condor).

    Altogether, I hope people won't get too upset at each other over this. Mosix is great stuff and Barak and his university have been generous in making it available freely up to this point.

  • ...and recommend it!
    MOSIX is great for general-purpose clustering. Processes are scattered across a cluster automatically without having to modify the programs. No API is needed other than usual Unix-level process use and it allows parallel execution of any program, although full use requires a parallel program design.

    I just wish that it would go in the official linux kernel, something like

    CONFIG_MOSIX=y

    It's a great chance that Linux doesn't only play catch up with other flavors of Unix - it can take the leadership and give us the ability to create clusters using the tools in the standard distribution!
    • MOSIX would change large parts of the kernel, it's not something as simple as just including a MOSIX module.

      The 2.4.13 patch even must have an effect on some SCSI code, because I can't compile a certain module for SCSI after MOSIX patching (one I didn't need anyway).

      I seriously doubt we will ever see MOSIX in the main kernel tree, sorry.

  • Good to see. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GiMP ( 10923 ) on Tuesday February 12, 2002 @01:11PM (#2994773)
    I had been using mosix for quite a while until recently. The 2.4.13+ext3+mosix release didn't even work properly with all of my hardware, oddly my networking refused to work at all; other kernels had no problems, a kernel built with the same .config worked fine on another box.

    Anyway, I had noticed that 2.4.13 was sticking around awhile.. meanwhile, the page was being updated.. adding some information about a user-space version and the 'disclaimer' on the download page.

    Mosix sounds like a good thing, but in reality it isn't very suitable for many of my common tasks. The biggest problem is the lack of support for programs using shared memory. Apache, Mysql, these do not migrate. Also, programs using Xwindows will not migrate well.. as they are network bound and will migrate back to their home node once they need to report the the Xserver. Basically, don't install mosix on 10 of your home machines and expect any kind of performance increase.. besides, you could probably toss out your dual 1ghz PIII, replace it with a 400mhz celeron and not notice a difference.

    It would be nice if there was a transparent pseudo layer for things like X.. where all of the machines have their IP for communicating via mosix.. but all 'outside' communication would be made via mosix though a 'public' ip. That public IP would then be used to connect to the Xserver; hence, apps network bound could migrate easily as they would still have the same IP and (spoofed) Mac address. Basically it would be building a NAT router into Mosix for the idea of being able to migrate network-bound applications. It sounds more complicated then it is, but less complicated then it is to impliment.. and I probably don't make any sense, but I know what I mean :) I do of course, assume that source IP is the biggest stumbling block in migrating network-bound applications.

  • Hey, check this out... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bhsx ( 458600 )
    For you Mandrake [mandrake.com] users, I head a project to include LTSP [ltsp.org] and Mosix [mosix.org] on a Mandrake configured kernel; to package and explain in very easy terms the whole process, and then eventually release a stripped-down Mdk, geared towards education (edu-tech is pretty much my field) ala K12 LTSP [k12ltsp.org]. We call it The Mandrake Mosix Terminal Server Project. [dynu.com] Check it out and lend a hand if interested. Thanks.
  • I found out the news yesterday, and I've already applied your patch + XFS. We've ran this on 1.5.2 and we haven't had too many problems with this setup.

    Coding wise the conflicts seemed trivial (and many times redundant). To minimize potential conflicts we don't use MFS and we don't use the debugger.

    The only difficulty came when we started using Mosix 1.5.2, we had some issues where we get intermittent periods of "Too many open files" when a node goes down. Somehow we've avoided them for the past month, we think this may have more to do with AutoFS.

    I'm wondering if you would like the diff from this? I'm also interested in helping with the DSM development and socket migration. I may be slow on the uptake but where can I start and help out?

  • Aptly named (Score:2, Insightful)

    by gutigre ( 539743 )
    Moshe Bar has released a new Mosix system: openMosix.

    The word "bar" is Hebrew for "free"... Free as in speech, not beer, believe it or not!
    • Bar can in fact mean two things in Hebrew:

      "son of" (which is not the case in my name)
      or
      "free, wild" (which by pure coincidence is the meaning of my name)

      Moshe Bar
  • i figured that's what this story needed

    QED
  • As a MOSIX user, I think that the MOSIX-newbies reading /. may be getting the
    wrong impression about this project.

    For starters, MOSIX is MUCH easier to install than both PVM and MPI. In a
    nutshell:

    Step 1: Install userland programs

    Step 2: Recompile kernel w/ MOSIX patch

    Step 3: Setup LILO and reboot

    Step 4: Repeat steps 2 & 3 for other nodes

    NOTE: In my case, I only installed userland programs on the first node.
    Although MOSIX is peer-to-peer, which is good, I'm using it with a master node.
    Eventually, I plan to set up a second master node for redundancy.

    NOTE #2: Most of the install is taken care of by using the install script.

    As an example, it took me half a day to set up my first eight-node MOSIX
    cluster, and 90% of that time was spent on the first node.

    On User-MOSIX vs. Kernel-MOSIX: I think we may be missing an important point
    here, as well:

    It may be possible to incorporate U-MOSIX in places where K-MOSIX is not
    possible (access to source code is required with K-MOSIX!). However, I do
    think that a bit of salesmanship may be going into the description of U-MOSIX:

    From the mosix.org website:

    "U-MOSIX is better tuned for cluster and GRID computing, including the ability
    to handle large number of short processes, run in heterogeneous clusters, with
    different versions of Unix such as FreeBSD, Linux and Solaris"

    How so? K-MOSIX is designed for hetero clustering. Large number of short
    processes? The only way I can see this is with TCP/IP apps and socket
    migration or with one helluva Myrinet connection between nodes. I can see the
    advantage in *nix compatibility with userland MOSIX, but clustering
    capabilities? I'll believe it when I see it. One of the principle advantages
    of MOSIX that I have seen over Condor and the like is that MOSIX is
    kernel-level. I've done my share of benchmarks, and nothing comes close.

    The statements on the mosix.org website lead me to believe that U-MOSIX is
    headed for commercial space. I hold no affiliation with either Professor
    Barak or Moshe Bar, but I will say this: If Prof. Barak can produce
    user-level code that outperforms K-MOSIX, then he deserves commercial
    compensation and I will be the first in line to order.

    I think that both gentlemen have done an outstanding job in producing a tool to
    be used by researchers around the globe. My greatest hope is that this
    development will spur competition (innovation is a better word, but WAY
    overused!) between the two organizations.

    Political Sidenote: I do feel that public educational funding should == open
    source, but federal research funding is a different matter. This type of
    funding is typically project-based, and IMHO the licensing of such should be
    the decision of the government involved. I would, however, like to know the
    specific problem that Professor Barak has with the GPL (assuming that the
    rumors are true).

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