2.2. The story so far

2.2.1. Historical Development

(To Be Written) The name "Mosix" comes from FEHLT. The 6th incarnation of Mosix was developed for BSD/OS. GNU/Linux was chosen as a development platform for the 7th incarnation in DATE_FEHLT because of

2.2.2. Current state

(To Be Written) Like most active Open Source programs, Mosix's rate of change tends to outstrip the the follower's ability to keep the documentation up to date. See the Mosix Home Page for current news. The following relates to Mosix VERSION FEHLT for the Linux kernel FEHLT as of DATUM FEHLT:

2.2.3. openMosix

openMosix is in addition to whatever you find at mosix.org and in full appreciation and respect for Prof. Barak's leadership in the outstanding Mosix project .

Moshe Bar has been involved for a number of years with the Mosix project (www.mosix.com) and was co-project manager of the Mosix project and general manager of the commercial Mosix company.

After a difference of opinions on the commercial future of Mosix, he has started a new clustering company - Qlusters, Inc. - and Prof. Barak has decided not to participate for the moment in this venture (although he did seriously consider joining) and held long running negotiations with investors. It appears that Mosix is not any longer supported openly as a GPL project. Because there is a significant user base out there (about 1000 installations world-wide), Moshe Bar has decided to continue the development and support of the Mosix project under a new name, openMosix under the full GPL2 license. Whatever code in openMosix comes from the old Mosix project is Copyright 2002 by Amnon Bark. All the new code is copyright 2002 by Moshe Bar.

openMosix is a Linux-kernel patch which provides full compatibility with standard Linux for IA32-compatible platforms. The internal load-balancing algorithm transparently migrates processes to other cluster members. The advantage is a better load-sharing between the nodes. The cluster itself tries to optimize utilization at any time (of course the sysadmin can affect these automatic load-balancing by manual configuration during runtime).

This transparent process-migration feature make the whole cluster look like a BIG SMP-system with as many processors as available cluster-nodes (of course multiplied with 2 for dual-processor systems). openMosix also provides a powerful mized for HPC-applications, which unlike NFS provides cache consistency, time stamp consistency and link consistency.

There could (and will) be significant changes in the architecture of the future openMosix versions. New concepts about auto-configuration, node-discovery and new user-land tools are discussed in the openMosix-mailing-list.

To approach standardization and future compatibility the proc-interface changes from /proc/mosix to /proc/hpc and the /etc/mosix.map was exchanged to /etc/hpc.map. Adapted command-line user-space tools for openMosix are already available on the web-page of the project and from the current version (1.1) Mosixview supports openMosix as well.

The hpc.map will be replaced in the future with a node-auto-discovery system.

openMosix is supported by various competent people (see www.openMosix.org) working together around the world. The gain of the project is to create a standardize clustering-environment for all kinds of HPC-applications.

openMosix has also a project web-page at http://openMosix.sourceforge.net with a CVS tree and mailing-list for the developer and user.