Hey guys -- I'm thinking of using open-mosix, but I need to understand something very simple.

In normal clustered computing, you have to run programs that are specially created for cluster environments- if you run a single thread, it runs on one node, and you might as well not have a cluster at all. Such multi-threaded apps are hard to come by and stuff

I want to use a cluster to speed up video encoding using ffmpeg and mplayer - single threads. Will open-mosix split that operation apart into chunks and have the cluster gang up on it? Similarily, I would like to run some Folding@Home on the cluster. Will open-mosix effectivly "cluster" single threaded application?

Thanx in advance for the info - it will decide if this is worth it for me to invest time in!

Bill

It's been awhile since I looked at OpenMosix, but as far as I know, it simply distributes jobs to the least loaded CPU. In other words, it migrates processes but does not make any attempt to split them up into work units to be run accross multiple CPUs. However, there's no reason why you couldn't do that yourself; e.g. write or find a little program to split up the input file, launch however many ffmpeg processes you need, and then let OpenMosix distribute those accross your cluster, and finally stitch together all of the mpeg files produced.

I've never actually played with this but AFAIK it should work.

Oh damn dude - that's pretty complex!

From what I see, there's a test program that just does math as a single operation, and gets forwarded around the cluster.

well, it's geeky, time consuming, mostly useless, involves linux.... looks like i'm building an OM cluster just for the heck of it!

I'll post my results and stuff.