[Gllug] openMosix

[John Hearns]

On Thu, 2003-11-27 at 17:35, mimo wrote:
> I would be interested if anyone is running this 
> (http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/). I have googled a bit but couldnt 
> find any real world reports esp. in ISP environments (mail and web).

Yes, we have one cluster running Mosix in the UK.

Its being used by scientists doing gene database searches.


Funnily enough, on the cluster front there was a discussion on the 
Sun Gridengine list about using Gridengine for running Spamassasin
across a cluster.
The concensus was, which is the same for any clustered application,
is that you have to watch for the job setup time vs. the computation
time. If the computation/setup+data transfer rate is short a cluster
may not bring you benefits.

The concensus on Gridengine was that you can 'round robin' loadbalance
the incoming main to several machines, easier than batch submitting
the jobs.


For an ISP mail/web environment I would be cautious about Mosix,
though it is well worth trying out.
Remember that it is intended for CPU intensive processes,
say graphics 
You have to share your data across a cluster.
That's normally via NFS, unless you are having a go at PVFS or
the Mosix ideas. Still experimental AFAIK.  
 (This is unless you have some nice fancy SAN)



Having said all that, Mosix is easy for the users to understand, and our
customer seems happy with it.

I'll talk about this till the cows come home though!



For web, won't some load balancing do you better?




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