Re: [Openmosix-Devel] Recommendations

I understand. That is a classic case for openMosix, except for the
fact that you cannot migrate a process away (ie evacuate) to another
node and then shut down it's home. open SSI does that. Also Qlusters
sells a product called TAM (Transparent Application Migration) which
migrates an app to another node completely.

I am far from saying oM is no good. All I am saying is that in vue of
all the difficulties and and in view of a paradigm shift in the
application programming due to multi-core, it makes it hard to push
forward the project.

Moshe

On 7/18/07, Wes Wagner <[email protected]> wrote:
> What we are using openmosix for is genetic programming, which is cpu
> intensive, not quite so memory intensive, and produces lots of single
> threaded processes since genetic programing is inherently tons more simple
> serialized rather than multi-threaded. It is better to have one thread per
> organism and just increase your population sizes to achieve the results you
> want.
>
> Now one could load all this into a queuing program - and run it via remote
> shell, but the other problem is that your processes run for a long time.
> This presents real problems if you want to take a node offline near
> immediately, but you don't want to abort the run. The other virtue of
> openmosix is the ability to PXE boot/CD boot random systems all over the
> network and borrow them, plus later gracefully shut them down.
>
> Overall, I evaluated alot of solutions and openmosix made the most sense
> because it was a set and forget type infrastructure. Plus with tools such as
> omuscd, you can get very lightweight workload balancing. Though queuing
> systems can balance how much workload they start on a system, major changes
> have to be made to your coding methods to provide for process migration.
>
> Sincerely,
> Wes Wagner
>
>
>
> On 7/18/07, Moshe Bar <[email protected]> wrote:
> > Paul, Wes, all
> >
> > I actually meant to write to the list before the week-end, but this is
> > a good opportunity.
> >
> > It's great to see that a few people have jumped into action (incl.
> > Florian) to try to finish the port of oM to 2.6.
> >
> > As to the reasons for my decision:
> >
> > It is true that time and resource constraints have played a role, but
> > only a minor one. After all, I have been able to keep the project
> > going while I started no less than 5 companies and keep them all
> > running, am involved with several others, wrote two books, and did
> > several of the other items on my list "things to do before I die".
> >
> > The real reasons for my decisions are indeed tied more to the
> > long-term vision and feasibility of the project. openMosix is about
> > high performance computing, in other words let  CPU (and to some
> > extent) RAM intensive apps run as fast as possible without hindrance
> > from the limitation of resources on local computers. We have all seen
> > that there are severe limitations to the SSI model due to the extreme
> > high impact of network latency, and due to the infeasible cost of
> > fully virtualizing the memory model (ie DSM), and the OS control block
> > across several nodes.
> >
> > It is tempting to think that with massive multi-cores, the advantage
> > of an SSI cluster stays because then you have "even more CPUs to play
> > with". That is not so. The migration from a  multi-core system where
> > multi-threaded applications (as all apps are currently being
> > re-written as) thrive and performe well to another such node, implies
> > a DSM model capable to relocate threads either in gangs or single
> > across nodes. In other words multi-cores are changing the application
> > landscape towards a massively threaded one, and these apps will not
> > perform well in a DSM cluster by definition due to very high true and
> > false sharing.
> >
> > Tests we performed at my company Qlusters with very low latency
> > inter-connects (< 1microsecond round-trip latency) with a very
> > efficient implementation of DSM have shown an regular performance
> > impacts of 100x to 1000x.
> >
> > Even the sgi Altix let's threads run in the same SMP quadrant.
> >
> >
> > The other big reason is that I have over the last two years
> > intensively looked for a successor and was not able to find somebody
> > with the willingness, stamina, maturity, leadership, and coding
> > expertise to take over.
> >
> > If this announcement brings forward somebody to deal with this latter
> > issue, that doesn't solve the prior issue of multi-core application
> > models.
> >
> > Finally, another reason is that user numbers have been going down very
> > quickly and mostly these were users with, say,  4 or 5 nodes with a
> > total of 4 to 6 CPUs. Well, you can get all of that with much simpler
> > ease of use with a dual socket, quad core system today.
> >
> > Please hammer away with comments. :-)
> >
> > Moshe
> >
> >
> >
> > On 7/18/07, Wes Wagner <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > Paul,
> > >
> > > I am working with the author of omuscd on a 2.6 openmosix port to the
> 2.6.22
> > > Kernel... I need to talk with him some more, but you should expect that
> the
> > > openmosix cluster will be picked up by another team.
> > >
> > > I just need until this weekend to get things organized. I believe Moshe
> > > underestimates the need for using multicore systems in a massive set and
> > > forget mode so people can do without the overhead of being concerned
> with
> > > queue and batch management.
> > >
> > > We have such a need and are currently building a 40 core farm expected
> to
> > > grow to the thousands of cores. It is my personal opinion that this
> > > announcement came mostly due to time and resource constraints, not the
> lack
> > > of a need for SSI style clustering.
> > >
> > > Please watch this space in the coming weeks:
> > >
> > > https://sourceforge.net/projects/om-2-6
> > >
> > > Our intent was originally to provide a source tree where you could
> download
> > > an x386 x686 x64_86 source that included the omuscd management daemon
> and
> > > went clean onto a vanilla kernel. I expect that the project will expand.
> > >
> > > Sincerely,
> > > Wes Wagner
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On 7/18/07, Paul Bennett < [email protected] > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Hi List,
> > > >
> > > > I just found out that openMosix was getting end-of-lifed.  Does anyone
> > > have any recommendations for another clustering option?
> > > >
> > > > I would like to go with something based on the 2.6 kernel and amd_64.
> > > >
> > > >
> http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=715406
> > > >
> > > > Thanks,
> > > >
> > > > Paul
> > > >
> > > >
> > >
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> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > --
> > > Wes Wagner
> > >
> > > Join a libertarian network of person-to-person lending on Prosper:
> > >
> > >
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> >
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>
>
> --
>
> Wes Wagner
>
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