High-Performance Cluster Computing with the MOSIX Multicomputer Operating System
Keywords:
Cluster computing, load-balancing, preemptive process migration, PVMAbstract
The scalable computing cluster at Hebrew University consists of 64 Pentium and Pentium- Pro servers that
are connected by fast Ethernet and the Myrinet LANs. It is running the MOSIX operating system, an
enhancement of BSD/OS with algorithms for adaptive resource sharing, that are geared for performance
scalability in a scalable computing cluster. These algorithms use a preemptive process migration for loadbalancing
and memory ushering, in order to create a convenient multi-user time-sharing execution
environment for HPC, particularly for applications that are written in PVM or MPI. This paper begins with
a brief overview of MOSIX and its resource sharing algorithms. Then the paper presents the performance
of these algorithms as well as the performance of several large-scale, parallel applications.
