OpenMosix

[Eugen Leitl]

http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=02/04/13/055227

Saturday April 13, 2002 - [ 05:00 AM GMT ]
Bruce Knox writes "Tel Aviv (April 11, 2002) - Dr. Moshe Bar recently 
announced the creation of openMosix, a new OpenSource project. The project 
has quickly attracted a team of volunteer developers from around the globe 
and is off to a very fast start. openMosix, is an extension of the Linux 
kernel. 

For thousands of users, MOSIX has been a reliable, fast and cost-efficient 
clustering platform with users in life sciences, finance, industry, 
high-tech, research and government environments. The goal of openMosix is 
to give to these users continued support and an up-to-date fully GPLv2 
OpenSource platform.

Moshe Bar

openMosix began as the last verifiable GPL version of MOSIX. All openMosix 
extensions are under the full GPLv2 license, the GNU General Public 
License (GPL) Version 2. The openMosix Copyright is held by Moshe Bar.

openMosix is a Linux kernel extension for single-system image clustering. 
openMosix is perfectly scalable and adaptive. Once you have installed 
openMosix, the nodes in the cluster start talking to one another and the 
cluster adapts itself to the workload.

There is no need to program applications specifically for openMosix. Since 
all openMosix extensions are inside the kernel, every application 
automatically and transparently benefits from the distributed computing 
concept of openMosix. The cluster behaves much as does a SMP, but this 
solution scales to well over a thousand nodes which can themselves be 
SMPs.

OpenSource is more than just free access to software source code. The 
basic idea behind open source is very simple: When programmers can read, 
redistribute, and modify the source code for a piece of software, the 
software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. And 
this can happen at a speed that, if one is used to the slow pace of 
conventional software development, seems astonishing. 
the Open Source Initiative

Moshe Bar is an Operating Systems researcher, writer of Byte Magazine 
column Serving With Linux , author of numerous Linux books, and frequent 
contributor to the Linux tree. Moshe lectures for universities, 
corporations, and international organizations. He holds a Bachelor degree 
in mathematics, a M.S. and a Ph.D. in computer science. Moshe runs 
moshebar.com with a mailing list of over 20,000 members, is Chief 
Technical Officer of Qlusters, Inc., and is the Project Manager for 
openMosix. Moshe was born in Israel, grew up in a kibbutz, and now lives 
in Tel Aviv.

The development team of volunteers is truly international. The early team 
members reside in Chile, Spain, Italy, Norway, Germany, Israel, France and 
the United States. Plus, other mailing list queries have come from Canada, 
Pakistan, Oman, Estonia, Finland, India, South Africa, Switzerland, Tonga, 
and Shanghai China. Projects using openMosix already include astrophysics, 
medical research, and university laboratories.

The openMosix project is hosted on SourceForge.net which provides 
collaborative development web tools for the project. Downloads, 
documentation, and additional information are available from 
www.openmosix.org.

MOSIX is a very highly regarded, high performance, low cost, flexible, and 
scaleable Cluster Computing System for Linux. MOSIX was a GPL OpenSource 
project until late 2001. MOSIX, operational since 1983, integrates 
independent computers into a cluster, providing the user with what appears 
to be a single-machine Linux environment. Both the MOSIX Copyright and the 
MOSIX Trademark are owned by Professor Amnon Barak. Amnon Barak is a 
Professor of Computer Science and the Director of the Distributed 
Computing Laboratory in the Institute of Computer Science at the Hebrew 
University of Jerusalem on sabbatical leave for one year.

openMosix is Copyright © 2002 by Moshe Bar.
Linux is Copyright © 2002 by Linus Torvalds.
Mosix is Copyright © 2002 by Amnon Barak.
openMosix is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 
2, June 1991 as published by the Free Software Foundation.
All logos and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Copyright © 2002 by Moshe Bar"