[ale] Converting 600 old laptops into K12LTSP thin clients for 1:1 ratio at a middle school

James P. Kinney III jkinney at localnetsolutions.com
Sun May 21 18:21:20 EDT 2006


On Sun, 2006-05-21 at 15:11 -0400, Daniel Howard wrote:

> I'll have to research what a MOSIX cluster is, maybe then it'll ring a 
> bell...
MOSIX is a system clustering kernel tool that allows for a group of
linux machines to act (loosely) as a single, large, multi-processor
machine. The reality of a MOSIX cluster is it is only good for problems
that are parallelizable into a large number of very small chunks and
none of the chunks require shared memory.

I built a MOSIX cluster when I was at Emory (it's amazing the things one
can do when no one is looking :) that used the student lab machines as a
cluster when they were not doing lab work on them. As long as the work
being done was small enough to fit in each nodes RAM (plus swap on RARE
occasions) it worked pretty well doing chaos calculations (those were
all independent runs with no shared data). But process that required
more extensive data transfer to load applications or libraries from the
mothernode to the child nodes was terrible. 

That was a while back. MOSIX has been under constant development and I'm
sure the mother-child node distribution issues have improved.
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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