[ale] mosix clusters?

[Jeff Hubbs]

On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 19:08, Stephen Turner wrote:
> my key interest in mosix clusters plays into that like you said, any
> operational computer can now add to the power, it doesnt have to be the
> same system, so you can walk into a current network and not have to do
> much except take thier old servers and run mosix and maybe add a little
> new hardware (tho most likely the conversion from nt to linux will be
> enough power for the time ;)
> 
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Now, Mosix only helps certain computing situations - POP3, Samba, and anything but 
very-high-volume Web serving are not those situations.

There are a lot of business computing operations that boil down to
performing an action with a definite beginning and a definite end and
where each action operates without any dependence on other instances of
the action.  

Think of a bunch of people sitting at desks entering paper form info
into an onscreen form and when that onscreen form is completed, they
signify that they're done and a computer job is initiated.  Suppose that
the job involves a lot of sheer computation and/or decision-making. 
Maybe a big Postscipt document has to be created.  Maybe it has to make
SQL queries of a RDBMS that isn't overloaded by all this.  The point is
that the computational aspects of the job have to outpace all other
dependent actions (like RDBMS access).  For instance, if the jobs result
in a lot of Postscript that gets faxed, there's little point in making
the job volume exceed your faxing capacity, at least in the long run.

At one place where I worked, the computer cluster was saturated daily by
interactive and batch processing and my sysadmin would say that part of
the problem was that the programmers had no concept of the hardware
their code ran on; they more or less wrote code for an arbitrary black
box.  You have to REALLY KNOW YOUR CODE'S LOAD to make Mosix a silver
bullet.

- Jeff


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