Re: [Openmosix-Devel] Recommendations

Hello all,

I'm using OM on a small company, 30 nodes, the nodes are the employees
workstations.
Our reasons to use OM over anything else so far are in order of importance:

Cost
Cost
Ease of use
Ease of deployment


Bassically we don't have money to buy a system JUST to run our
simulations. But OM provides us with an easy to deploy-and-use number
cruncher at no extra cost. Using OM we are not forced to code our
programs in any special way (we are no expert coders).

A typical usage scenario is to launch any needed number of instances
of our program and let the OM do its thing, we don't have to worry
about anything else.

Given that OM has worked so well for us in the past (using it since
2004) I haven't looked at any alternatives. But my impression is that
there are not many as mature and easy to deploy-use as OM.

Just my comment
Hugo


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:
> >
> > http://www.prosper.com/groups/group_home.aspx?group_short_name=freelibertarians&referrer=AiriusTorpora&utm_source=referrer-AiriusTorpora&utm_medium=referral-link&utm_content=join_my_group-160x33&utm_campaign=referrals-group
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> >
> >
>
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