Re: [BProc] bproc vs openMosix

[<ha...@no...>]

Hi Luke,

I never tried Mosix and I never had 1GB process in my small
bproc-based cluster but I guess bproc users could enjoy more stability
simply because bproc does not do many complicated things done in
Mosix.

I do not know if you are aware of the functionality delivered by bproc
- people often expect it to be much more Mosix-like than it is just
because it also migrates processes. On the other hand, it is quite
possible that bproc will make former Mosix users happy because they
might be willing to accept slightly bigger mental involvement than
before to get more stability than before.

To summarise shortly (either for you or others reading this in
archives later on), bproc system usually migrates process once only,
from master node to one of slave nodes, just after process creation.
Main motivation for migration is simplified cluster setup - slave
nodes can contain nearly nothing, they can even be so simple that the
process could not be started on them (and have to be migrated
there). Or the slaves can be more complete but the processes might be
still created on the master just to make it easier to control them.

Load balancing can still be done with bproc, thought the decision
where shall the process run is done at process startup only. Balancing
decisions must be done by a batch spooling system (and not bproc
itself) - we use SGE (which is rather unusual with bproc but works
fine), there are others like bjs (which I never tried).

HTH

Vaclav Hanzl