Re: [PLUG] distributing work

[Kevin Brosius <cobra@compuserve.com>]

Jeff wrote:
> I have several machines at my disposal to do a large but easily
> dividable task. I have a shared filesystem between the machines. The
> thing that drives the work is a shell script.

This depends a lot on what type of work you are doing.  I'm not familiar
with the tool Gabriel mentions, but another choice is OpenMOSIX.  It is
strong at migrating linux processes across a local network to other
machines.  The nice feature is that all you need to do is kick off work
that loads a single machine heavily (with multiple processes.)  As the
load goes up, an OpenMosix system will move processes across the network
away from the heavily loaded machine onto the other machines.

How well this performs depends heavily on the job type and the mix of
machines involved.  It's easier to setup than a Beowulf though, because
it's a kernel patch plus some utils and system setup.  Beowulf was a lot
more painful, as I recall.

I've used the precursor to OpenMOSIX, the older Mosix system to do some
multi-tasking make load balancing.  It was moderately helpful in that
task.

-- 
Kevin
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