The scalable PC cluster at Hebrew University consists of 50 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 UNIX with on-line algorithms for dynamic resource sharing that are geared for performance scalability in a scalable computing cluster. These algorithms use preemptive process migration for load-balancing memory-sharing and IPC optimization, in order to create a convenient multi-user time-sharing execution environment for high performance computing, particularly for applications that are written in PVM and MPI.
The talk gives an overview of MOSIX, its networking performance and its resource sharing algorithms. The talk also presents our experience with the execution of several large-scale, parallel applications.