On Sun, 28 Oct 2007, Sandip Dev wrote: > I am totally new to clustering. It seems most clustering software like > OpenMosix need 2.4 kernel to work. Where can I get a older 2.4 kernel based > Linux? Any ideas. Also does MPICH and OpenMPI require 2.4 kernel to run or > do they run on 2.4? Also do these support 64 bit processors
It's still easy to download 2.4 based distributions, but you should make certain that's what you need. If you are interested in performance, Mosix isn't the right place to start. Transparent process migration results in considerable performance loss during I/O and communication. This performance loss can be reduced by knowing about the migration, but then you've discarded the benefit of the "transparent" part, and should be using "directed" processes migration. More directly on topic, the tradeoff between 2.4 and 2.6 is The 2.4 kernel performs better on small configurations, and most 2.4-based distributions are much more memory efficient. This is important when running full installation on compute nodes with 1GB or less memory The 2.6 kernel has a better scheduler when running many processes, especially on SMPs. With the 2.4 kernel we got a significant performance advantage by running only compute processes on dedicated, lightweight compute nodes. This eliminated the opportunity for the processes scheduler to make bad decisions. We still see an advantage with lightweight compute nodes using a 2.6 kernel, but the O(1) scheduler and 8 core machines have eliminated the worst problems. (Well, except that a few daemons on workstation-oriented distributions are becoming Completely Evil Device support. This is the killer for using 2.4 on new machines. Most new motherboards have devices that you'll need a 2.6 kernel for. And not an old kernel, a pretty recent one. -- Donald Becker [EMAIL PROTECTED] Penguin Computing / Scyld Software www.penguincomputing.com www.scyld.com Annapolis MD and San Francisco CA _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
