4 ms·

This reminds me of OpenMOSIX, which implemented a good chunk of POSIX in a distributed fashion. MPI also comes to mind, but it's more focused on the IPC mechan

by synack 6y ago

This reminds me of OpenMOSIX, which implemented a good chunk of POSIX in a distributed fashion. MPI also comes to mind, but it's more focused on the IPC mechanisms. I always liked Plan 9's approach, where every CPU is just a file and you execute code by writing to that file, even if it's on a remote filesystem.

anfractuosity 6y ago
I recall OpenMosix too, I remember playing with it on a couple of old machines a while ago. I thought it seemed quite a cool idea. I think I was trying to do mp3 encoding from CDs with it in a distributed fashion.
synack 6y ago
Ah, the Plan 9 bits I was remembering are actually in Inferno... http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/grid-cpu.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/grid-cpu.html
notacoward 6y ago
Same reaction here. MOSIX was basically this idea developed for real. Turns out there are a bunch of secondary problems to do with namespaces and security, scheduling and resource use, topology, performance, and so on. In the end it never turned out to be all that practical, and I know of several efforts (e.g. LOCUS) that went quite far to reach the same conclusion. There's a reason that non-transparent "shared nothing" distributed computing came to dominate the computing landscape.
adrianpike 6y ago
Whoa, I was just talking about OpenMOSIX the other day - at my college job, when we retired workstations, they would just sit in the back closet for years until facilities would get around to getting them up for auction. We set up a TFTP boot setup and had a few dozen nodes at any given time. It wasn't high performance by any fashion, but it worked pretty transparently and was always fun to throw heavy synthetic workloads at it and watch the cluster rebalance and hear the fans spin up on the clunky old pentium's.
dghughes 6y ago
Funny almost exactly one year ago I was desperately trying to learn about and demo a Linux cluster. I happened upon ClusterKnoppix and used that LiveCD as my demo which uses OpenMOSIX. And MPI as well but I was having a lot of trouble getting it all in my head and having to explain it during a presentation. I'm glad that over with! But it was still fun.
- AstroJetson 6y ago
  Came here to write about ClusterKnoppix! It was amazing and I had 7 small form factor PC's running a mini cluster. It was great for moving things around. Problem was it fell behind in releases and it became hard to get applications to run on it. Knoppix was how I got into Linux, it still ranks as my favorite distro. Thanks Klaus Knopper for your work in setting that up! It would be nice if it worked on Raspberry Pi, or if there was a simple way to set OpenMOSIX up on Pi's
AstroJetson 6y ago
For people that want to try OpenMOSIX out, take a look at this site http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html He has a distro that is called Quantian, with a big collection of science tools added. Shame it's Sunday, I'll need to wait a week to pull it down and see how well it flys.
- aasasd 6y ago
  > Knoppix Now that's a blast from the past.
- AstroJetson 6y ago
  Found the developer, he passed on 'quantian 0.7.9.2 iso' leads to http://sunsite.rwth-aachen.de:3080/ftp/pub/Linux/quantian/ http://sunsite.rwth-aachen.de:3080/ftp/pub/Linux/quantian/ This was the last release.
reidacdc 6y ago
Came here for the MOSIX, not disappointed. I worked at a facility that ran it on a small science cluster, and it worked extremely well. A fun wrinkle: When the Intel C compilers first came out, they had warnings about process migration -- there's an executable mode where the executable checks to see what kind of CPU it's on at launch-time, and then branches to CPU-specific code blocks during the run. This can be dangerous, the check is only done once, so if the CPU type changes in mid-run due to migration to different hardware, Bad Things can happen.
- mprovost 6y ago
  This sounds like the same feature that Intel's C compiler used to "cripple AMD" by switching to a slower code path when it detected that the program was running on a non-Intel CPU. https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49
gutta-percha 6y ago
Kerrighed was a similar project from INRIA in France. Process migration was more transparent than with OpenMOSIX (no special launch command like mosrun). It even supported thread migration!
zeruch 6y ago
MPI / MPICH were the first things I thought of when I saw the headline. I was like "thats not new...HPC has been doing message passing for decades this way." :)

by synack 6y ago

anfractuosity 6y ago

I recall OpenMosix too, I remember playing with it on a couple of old machines a while ago. I thought it seemed quite a cool idea. I think I was trying to do mp3 encoding from CDs with it in a distributed fashion.

synack 6y ago

Ah, the Plan 9 bits I was remembering are actually in Inferno... http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/grid-cpu.html http://www.vitanuova.com/inferno/man/4/grid-cpu.html

notacoward 6y ago

Same reaction here. MOSIX was basically this idea developed for real. Turns out there are a bunch of secondary problems to do with namespaces and security, scheduling and resource use, topology, performance, and so on. In the end it never turned out to be all that practical, and I know of several efforts (e.g. LOCUS) that went quite far to reach the same conclusion. There's a reason that non-transparent "shared nothing" distributed computing came to dominate the computing landscape.

adrianpike 6y ago

Whoa, I was just talking about OpenMOSIX the other day - at my college job, when we retired workstations, they would just sit in the back closet for years until facilities would get around to getting them up for auction. We set up a TFTP boot setup and had a few dozen nodes at any given time. It wasn't high performance by any fashion, but it worked pretty transparently and was always fun to throw heavy synthetic workloads at it and watch the cluster rebalance and hear the fans spin up on the clunky old pentium's.

dghughes 6y ago

Funny almost exactly one year ago I was desperately trying to learn about and demo a Linux cluster. I happened upon ClusterKnoppix and used that LiveCD as my demo which uses OpenMOSIX. And MPI as well but I was having a lot of trouble getting it all in my head and having to explain it during a presentation. I'm glad that over with! But it was still fun.

AstroJetson 6y ago
Came here to write about ClusterKnoppix! It was amazing and I had 7 small form factor PC's running a mini cluster. It was great for moving things around. Problem was it fell behind in releases and it became hard to get applications to run on it. Knoppix was how I got into Linux, it still ranks as my favorite distro. Thanks Klaus Knopper for your work in setting that up! It would be nice if it worked on Raspberry Pi, or if there was a simple way to set OpenMOSIX up on Pi's

AstroJetson 6y ago

For people that want to try OpenMOSIX out, take a look at this site http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian.html He has a distro that is called Quantian, with a big collection of science tools added. Shame it's Sunday, I'll need to wait a week to pull it down and see how well it flys.

aasasd 6y ago
> Knoppix Now that's a blast from the past.
AstroJetson 6y ago
Found the developer, he passed on 'quantian 0.7.9.2 iso' leads to http://sunsite.rwth-aachen.de:3080/ftp/pub/Linux/quantian/ http://sunsite.rwth-aachen.de:3080/ftp/pub/Linux/quantian/ This was the last release.

reidacdc 6y ago

Came here for the MOSIX, not disappointed. I worked at a facility that ran it on a small science cluster, and it worked extremely well. A fun wrinkle: When the Intel C compilers first came out, they had warnings about process migration -- there's an executable mode where the executable checks to see what kind of CPU it's on at launch-time, and then branches to CPU-specific code blocks during the run. This can be dangerous, the check is only done once, so if the CPU type changes in mid-run due to migration to different hardware, Bad Things can happen.

mprovost 6y ago
This sounds like the same feature that Intel's C compiler used to "cripple AMD" by switching to a slower code path when it detected that the program was running on a non-Intel CPU. https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49 https://www.agner.org/optimize/blog/read.php?i=49#49

gutta-percha 6y ago

Kerrighed was a similar project from INRIA in France. Process migration was more transparent than with OpenMOSIX (no special launch command like mosrun). It even supported thread migration!

zeruch 6y ago

MPI / MPICH were the first things I thought of when I saw the headline. I was like "thats not new...HPC has been doing message passing for decades this way." :)