Re: Heterogeneous Openmosix cluster

Tony Travis wrote:
> Miguel Hernández wrote:
>   
>> Hello,
>> I'd like to know the cost of installing Openmosix in an heterogeneous 
>> cluster.
>> Is it efficient at all?
>> tnks,
>>     
>
> Hello, Mhdez.
>
> It depends what you mean by 'heterogeneous', and 'efficient'...
>
> We've got various different motherboards with Athlon XP2400+/2600+, 
> Athlon64 and Opteron. To get this all working together, you need a 
> 'lowest common denominator' openMosix kernel. I use the 2.4.26 32-bit 
> kernel with 'K7' optimisations on all our nodes, including AMD64's.
>
> I'm looking forward to trying out the 64-bit version of the 2.6 
> openMosix kernel, but it won't run on any of our 32-bit CPU's ;-)
>
> Best wishes,
>
> 	Tony.
>   
The 2.6 version will arrive soon :)

Anyway, an heterogeneous cluster can be built as long as all your nodes 
share the same architecture, you can't mix 32bit nodes with 64bit nodes. 
For now, the 64bit version seems to work properly, and we are fixing 
issues encountered on 32bit versions.

In theory it would be possible to migrate a 32bit task from a 32bit node 
to a 64bit node, and then between 64bit node but this would require some 
work on the kernel side, add it to the todolist if you need it, we may 
do it as well. Anyway, it will never be possible to migrate any 64bit 
task to anything else than a 64bit node...

About efficiency, it depends on how your program is built, not on the 
cluster itself. If your programs use shared memory and lots of syscall, 
then they might even run slower on a cluster than on a single PC (but 
they will run in parallel, which means you can run more of them...)


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