“Searching for an easy way to speed up huge compilations or
scale up your Internet services? Take a look at MOSIX, an open
source clustering project from Hebrew University that features
power without a price.”
“Sooner or later, you’ll want to strengthen your Linux
processing power, and you’ll find that it’s not easy. The Linux
kernel doesn’t support higher-class multiprocessor server machines.
The 2.2.x kernel is able to run on at most four-processor machines;
the long-awaited 2.4.0 kernel SMP enhancements will be able to run
on machines with up to 16 processors, matching what Microsoft
Windows 2000 Advanced Server can do, but 16 processors is still too
few for power-hungry tasks.”
“Don’t lose faith in the penguin yet! Clustering could be the
solution. Clustering offers two main advantages — scalable power
and redundancy/high availability (HA). Most cluster solutions offer
load balancing and switching around damaged nodes. One such Linux
clustering solution is MOSIX.”
“MOSIX is under development at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
It was originally developed for BSD, but now Linux is its exclusive
development platform — on x86 architecture only, unfortunately.
The MOSIX team aims to build clustering software that will act for
users and processes as a single system. The idea is simple: MOSIX
automatically distributes processing jobs between cluster nodes
(hosts). The core of MOSIX implements adaptive load balancing and
preemptive process migration across a networked group of
machines.”