openMosix

[-Woody-]

Hi!

 

I am new to the forum and a general noob when it comes to the more complex side of tech. I have a few identical older workstations (I7-3770 based) and a couple 10gb network cards lying around so I was doing a bit of reading to see if there is anything interesting I could do with them. I stumbled across something called Mosix, and then specifically openMosix. My question is: would it be possible, however impractical, to use something like openMosix to link the workstations I have together into a sort of "DIY supercomputer". I realize that it wouldn't be very practical from a performance/cost perspective but I think it would be a great learning opportunity for me if it is possible. 

 

P.S. I searched the forum trying to find a thread like this but I couldn't. I apologize if this has already been addressed somewhere else. Cheers!

 

openMosix: 

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenMosix#ClusterKnoppix

[Sauron]

16 minutes ago, -Woody- said:

My question is: would it be possible, however impractical, to use something like openMosix to link the workstations I have together into a sort of "DIY supercomputer".

OpenMosix is extremely outdated. While in theory what you want to do is possible in practice the development has halted completely over a decade ago. It only works with Linux 2.4.x (which isn't currently used by any readily available and supported distribution afaik).

 

There are more modern and supported alternatives such as Slurm or TORQUE. Another cool project is distcc, a distributed C* compiler.

[-Woody-]

19 hours ago, Sauron said:

OpenMosix is extremely outdated. While in theory what you want to do is possible in practice the development has halted completely over a decade ago. It only works with Linux 2.4.x (which isn't currently used by any readily available and supported distribution afaik).

 

There are more modern and supported alternatives such as Slurm or TORQUE. Another cool project is distcc, a distributed C* compiler.

I see. As for these other solutions you mentioned, would any of them allow for the 'splitting up' of single tasks like benchmarking software, or are they more intended to distribute and simultaneously tackle multiple tasks at once? Also out of curiosity, would any of these solutions allow for running windows in a virtual machine on the "host" system?

 

P.S. I am more than a little out of my depth with this topic but it's a fascinating area to me so thank you for indulging my curiosity.

[Sauron]

29 minutes ago, -Woody- said:

would any of them allow for the 'splitting up' of single tasks like benchmarking software

It depends on the specific software, specifically on how it handles parallel computations.

30 minutes ago, -Woody- said:

would any of these solutions allow for running windows in a virtual machine on the "host" system?

You could definitely run a virtual machine, after all it's still Linux. I'm not sure if you would be able to allocate cores from both machines to the VM though (probably not and it would depend on the hypervisor anyway).

[-Woody-]

18 minutes ago, Sauron said:

It depends on the specific software, specifically on how it handles parallel computations.

You could definitely run a virtual machine, after all it's still Linux. I'm not sure if you would be able to allocate cores from both machines to the VM though (probably not and it would depend on the hypervisor anyway).

Thanks, I will definitely look into the other solutions you suggested. I don't think I have any other questions at the moment.

 

Cheers