[ale] mosix clusters?

[Jeff Hubbs]

On Sun, 2002-06-23 at 19:06, Stephen Turner wrote:
> power consumption is another key ;)ok so running a mosix cluster in a
> company with apache, samba, and pop3 access on one cluster... this is a
> good idea with mosix? or bad? ive been tossing that idea around for a
> while, and how things would hold up, basically ive come to the conclusion
> you need an extra server off somewhere for backup, since i do not see how
> the mosix clustering provides data redundancy, perhaps, thats better left
> for raid? or just slap it on a tower off to the side with enough space to
> back up the cluster..... what are your suggestions?
> 
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One of the Linux mags had an article about using Mosix as a
load-balanced Web server cluster, but please, we're talking about VERY
HEAVY Web server loading when you talk about doing such a thing.  We're
talking about more hits than a single machine can handle!  Slashdot has
to have clustered Web servers.  

Mosix for Samba doesn't make a whole lot of sense.  You'd be better off
splitting up your SMB files sharing along functional lines, e.g.,
separate heavy-read from heavy-write.

I'm not sure about POP3; there may be a Mosix benefit there, but seeing
that all cluster nodes would have to share their disk space, I fear
you'd only be moving your choke point elsewhere.

Mosix is not really meant to be a failover solution.  It can ACT LIKE
one in the situation I described before if you design it for that (e.g.,
write your batching mechanism such that it waits for a job completion
confirmation).  

Mosix is flexible in how you utilize your nodes.  For my rig, I plan to
have a "Node 0" on which I initiate jobs.  However, you can set up Mosix
such that local apps don't migrate, meaning that you can take an office
full of unintelligently-bought 2GHz Dell desktops and turn them into a
freaking supercomputer and the users will never know!

Remember, the purpose of RAID is to go from individual accident-prone
physical drives to fault-tolerant VIRTUAL drives made from two or more
physical drives.  Mosix does not do that for you.

- Jeff 




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