Re: [Xen-users] Xen as alternative for openMosix? about clustering

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wednesday 12 July 2006 10:28, Emiliano Gabrielli wrote:
> On Tuesday 11 July 2006 10:49, Peter Vandersteegen wrote:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > My problem: I have some desktop pc's on my work I would like to use as
> > calculation nodes in a cluster.
> > When I  start a job on the central node,  the cluster should be able to
> > load balance these jobs.
> >
> > Has anybody ever used Xen for this purpose?  What are the alternatives,
> > besides Xen and OpenMosix?
> > In our group we have used openMosix, but we seem to get more and more
> > faults we can not solve.   Development  of openMosix also seems to have
> > stopped.
> >
> > The idea for using XEN:
> > Run several light weight OS on the central node.  Log in to one of these
> > light weight OS, start your process and let load balancing take care of
> > the job?
> > Has anybody already tried this?  What are the pros and cons of this idea?
> >
> > regards
> >
> > Peter
>
> Xen can only virtualize N logical systems over single phisical system ..
> the resources of the phisical system are limited and no advantage can be
> taken introducing the xen overhead (even if little) ...
> openMosix makes you use N *phisical* system as a single logical system, the
> cluster itself ... and tries to make this transparent to the userspace
> applications...
>
> these two concept are totally differents ...

I think Peter was referring to using Xen's live OS migration instead of 
process migration...  Is that right Peter?

Although as Emiliano stated, you can only have one virtual machine resident on 
one physical machine at once, if you split up each computation job onto a 
different virtual machien it should be possible to load balance those jobs 
across the cluster.

Note that there's no (free) load balancer for Xen at the moment, but you could 
probably write your own.

Cheers,
Mark

-- 
Dave: Just a question. What use is a unicyle with no seat?  And no pedals!
Mark: To answer a question with a question: What use is a skateboard?
Dave: Skateboards have wheels.
Mark: My wheel has a wheel!

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