The MOSIX multicomputer operating system for high performance cluster computing

The scalable computing cluster at Hebrew University consists of 88 Pentium II 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 load-balancing and memory ushering, in order to create a convenient multiuser 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. Copyright (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.