MOSIX

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MOSIX is a cluster management system that provides single-system image (SSI) capabilities, e.g automatic work distribution among nodes. It is particularly useful for running parallel and intensive I/O applications.

It has been developed since 1981 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem by Prof. Amnon Barak and others. It was first called MOS (Multicomputer OS), and ran on Unix. Later versions were ported to BSD (1993) and Linux (1999).

The core of MOSIX are adaptive algorithms that monitor and respond to cluster-wide resource requirements (of all the processes) by automatic migration of processes to the best available nodes. These algorithms are geared for ease-of-use, maximal performance, and to be overhead-free scalability.

The algorithms of MOSIX use preemptive (transparent) process migration for:

Automatic distribution and redistribution of processes;
Moving processes from slower to faster nodes;
Load balancing - for even work distribution;
Migrating processes from nodes that run out of memory, to prevent swapping or thrashing;
Parallel I/O - by migrating intensive I/O processes to file servers (rather than the traditional way of bringing data to the processes).

Recent trends in cluster and grid computing, in which many applications consist of large number of processes and/or large amounts of data, e.g., genomic or financial modeling, prompt the development of the Mosix Parallel I/O (MOPI) package. MOPI enhances the computing capabilities of Mosix with the ability to support massive parallel I/O. It is targeted at applications that need to process vast amounts of data, ranging from few GByte/s to Terabyte/s.

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