Is it possible to run Ubuntu as Shared OS (Multiprocessing)?

[Ewan Mac Mahon]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2005 at 08:05:06PM +0100, Lee Braiden wrote:
> On Sunday 10 Jul 2005 20:01, Magnus Therning wrote:
> > Any particular task you want to parallelise?
> 
This is _really_ important. Some applications just don't work well with
some clustering solutions, so it's important to have the app first and
pick the cluster system to fit.
 
> I mentioned Xen in my post.  I was thinking of Mosix, though; xen is sort of 
> the opposite :)
> 
> I'm not sure what the difference between mosix and openMosix is, but if the 
> latter does the job you need, it's most likely preferable :)
> 
OpenMosix is indeed to be preferred; short history is that there was
Mosix which was GPLed, then one developer decided to take it closed,
another forked off at that point to form OpenMosix, and last time I
checked the Open variant was receiving a lot more attention.

However, and it's a big however, there's not much you can usefully do to
cluster a PC, two PPCs, and some Suns in any meaningful way. Both
OpenMosix and Xen are x86 specific, and even in general the machines
have such fundamental differences as number formats that it would be
difficult to share work between them. The best you could do would
probably be to have a queuing system distribute multiple jobs to the
machines, one job per machine at any given time. That assumes that you
can build whatever software is going to process the jobs on all of the
architectures. Furthermore unless the OP is loaded I'd guess the Suns
are old second hand ones, in which case a modern PC is likely to thrash
them for straightforward speed, so it's not worth it anyway. It might be
better to use the extra machines as servers for stuff like
mail/dns/dhcp/ldap/etc.

Ewan
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