Beowulf [& VMWare]

Donald Becker becker at scyld.com
Thu Nov 7 14:39:49 PST 2002


On 7 Nov 2002, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-11-07 at 13:45, Donald Becker wrote:
> > On 31 Oct 2002, Timothy H. Keitt wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2002-10-31 at 13:30, Donald Becker wrote:
...
> > > VMware aside, I'm not aware that openmosix precludes the use of mpi or
> > > pvm or standard batch processing. Are these not good solutions for
> > > scalable or performance-oriented clustering?

I read that as repeating the claim that openmosix is a good solution,
rather than simply that it's possible to ignore openmosix on the
machine.  If you are ignore it, why even bring it up?

> > The features Mosix provides are
> >   single point application updates
> >   single process space view
> > Scyld Beowulf provides these at much lower CPU overhead.
> 
> My point was that you don't _have_ to use the automatic process
> migration on an openmosix cluster, you can do whatever load balancing
> you want in your mpi (or other) code.

You don't get any benefit from openmosix, only costs:
   Openmosix adds some overhead, albeit not much when unused.
   Openmosix might still move a process away from its machine during CPU
     intensive phases of the computation,

-- 
Donald Becker				becker at scyld.com
Scyld Computing Corporation		http://www.scyld.com
410 Severn Ave. Suite 210		Scyld Beowulf cluster system
Annapolis MD 21403			410-990-9993




More information about the Beowulf mailing list