wake-on-LAN, thin nodes, etc.

[Huntsinger, Reid]

Yes, PVM and Mosix are compatible. There's a case study in: Barak A.,
Braverman A., Gilderman I. and La'adan O., Performance of PVM with the MOSIX
Preemptive Process Migration , Proc. 7th Israeli Conf. on Computer Systems
and Software Engineering, Herzliya, pp. 38-45, June 1996. Available at:
http://www.mosix.cs.huji.ac.il/ftps/mosixhpcc.ps.gz.

You might wish to look into openMosix (www.openmosix.org); among other
considerations, the license status of Mosix is not exactly "free", and the
openMosix list is quite a bit more active than the Mosix list.

Mosix and openMosix have both been reported to work well with PVM and
versions of MPI. The process migration mechanism is not visible to PVM/MPI
as it is kernel-level.

Reid Huntsinger


-----Original Message-----
Date: Fri, 4 Oct 2002 17:36:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jack Wathey <wathey at salk.edu>
To: Beowulf at beowulf.org
cc: bartol at salk.edu
Subject: wake-on-LAN, thin nodes, etc.

[...]
Question 3:

Are PVM and Mosix compatible with one another?

Most of the code I plan to run on the new cluster uses PVM and is
not communication-bound.  I have heard so many good things about
Mosix, though, that I would like to install it, too, and use it
for other tasks.  My understanding of Mosix is that it creates one
unified process space for the whole cluster, and will move processes
around from node to node as necessary to keep the load balanced.
This seems at odds with the PVM way of doing things, in which each
child process is told what host it will run on at the time it is
spawned.  If a PVM-based application is running on a cluster that
has Mosix, will Mosix move the pvm tasks to different nodes as they
are running?  I imagine this would cause catastrophic problems for
such an application, since pvm tasks only communicate through their
local pvm daemons.  I'd also welcome comments from devotees of
bproc.

[...]

Best wishes,

Jack Wathey


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