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pturing
wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 19:11
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Unfortunately, openmosix is dead
http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/
It seems they decided that with all the dual and quad-core action going on, Single-System-Image computing is not as cool any more.
Also note that doing transparent openmosix-style HPC requires high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect to be useful (not necessarily Infiniband, but just LANs rather than DSL)
Grid-computing stuff like folding@home and seti@home work over the internet because they are working with problems where it's ok if you don't hear back from one machine for a few hours or days.
However, take a look at http://lwn.net/Articles/271792/ which describes what's going on in this area in the Fedora world
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This would be a great feature for Ubuntu Server.
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Very interesting link, thanks. I knew that Moshe had stopped work on openmosix, but it's under the GPL so couldn't it be used and improved? With regard to grid computing, I think it might be useful for rendering large amounts of video or graphics where you don't need to get a result immediately?
"Also note that doing transparent openmosix-style HPC requires high-bandwidth low-latency interconnect to be useful (not necessarily Infiniband, but just LANs rather than DSL)"
I'm not a professional or competent IT guy, but I think I understand this. It would only work over lan networks, what about wifi?
Thanks for the feedback.
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AnRa
wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 20:50
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It could use Kerrighed.
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pturing
wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 21:14
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Yes :)
Anyone with the right skillz that's interested could revive the project
Also if someone were to put up the money to pay people to work on it, such as a company that could sell more hardware if people could use it with openmosix
The cool thing about Openmosix is that you can use it with programs that weren't specifically written for it. The problem with it is that you have to get as close to that as you can with your networking to make it work well. I'll try to illustrate why.
Suppose you are writing a program to encode a video on one machine. You're going to have it grab pieces of the video as-needed from the disk, and then encode them. You don't want to grab them all at once, because then there is a long delay before you actually start, and maybe it doesn't all fit in memory at once.
With a cluster, the situation is different. It's not efficient any more to grab a tiny piece, work on it, get another piece, and work on it. There's more of a delay between the time you tell the system to send you a piece of data to work on, and the time you get it. So, you go ahead and have it send you a bunch of data up front, or you have it constantly sending you data before you need it.
With a LAN, the delay to get data is actually pretty close to if it was on the same machine, so openmosix works ok. Over the internet, things are 100 times slower - it might take 1/10th of a second to get something instead of 1/1000th. It may still seem like a short period of time, but it really adds up when you can do 3 billion or more things in a second in your CPU.
For renderfarms, I think the way to go is to modify the application software to use a library like Open MPI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMPI
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pturing
wrote on the 12 Mar 08 at 21:20
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openmosix might work ok over a good wifi connection; they getting to be in the same ballpark as a wired LAN
You should also check out distcc
http://distcc.samba.org/
I think the apple guys have this working with rendezvous/bonjour/zeronf/whatever it's called these days. So you can put a bunch of macs on a network and use them automagically for your compile jobs
I would love to see stuff like that in Ubuntu for compiling, video encoding, etc
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>The cool thing about Openmosix is that you can use it with programs that weren't specifically written for it. The problem with it is that you have to get as close to that as you can with your networking to make it work well. I'll try to illustrate why.
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That is exactly the point. No modification needed. I have done trials on openmosix and have always found it a brilliant great working idea. Rendering with PovRay, 4 machines really cut down your rendering time to a quarter.
Multicore systems have not defeated the whole thing, on the contrary, now that programs are done to run on several cores, moving them from machine to machine is even better.
A business idea that I always had but never realized was to build a special rack, where you can just plug in standard compliant (desktop standard) hardware boxes. They power on automatically and boot up via PXE (or an USB stick). When you need more processing power, just go buy one or two more systems and plug them in to make them participate in the cluster. No maintenance, no hassle, no setup, no modifying the application. Very very cheap and cost efficient.
There used to be a distro called ClusterKnoppix, which did that with just a CD. Companies could pop these CDs in at evenings and rent out their company Desktops to render for other companies, providing a gigantic large cluster.
The openmosix idea is just to good to be left dead. Too bad I am no good at programing and just an admin.
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The openMosix project is still developed and maintained by different people. The work goes slowly but it's always a good idea to give it a hand ;)
Check their trac here:
http://openmosix.yuhu.biz
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HDave
wrote on the 13 Mar 08 at 13:30
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So then forget about openMosix...the point here is that Ubuntu needs first class support for grid computing. I totally agree...its a GREAT idea, especially for Ubuntu Server.
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