MOSIX Evaluation on a Linux Cluster

Najib Kofahi¹, Saeed Al Zahrani², and Syed Manzoor Hussain³

¹Department of Computer Sciences, Yarmouk University, Jordan

²Saudi Aramco, SA

 ³Dept. of Information and Computer Science, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, SA 

Abstract: Multicomputer Operating System for Unix (MOSIX) is a cluster-computing enhancement of Linux kernel that supports preemptive process migration. It consists of adaptive resource sharing algorithms for high performance scalability by migrating processes across a cluster. Message passing Interface (MPI) is a library standard for writing message passing programs, which has the advantage of portability and ease of use. This paper highlights the advantages of a process migration model to utilize computing resources better and gain considerable speedups in the execution of parallel and multi-tasking applications. We executed several CPU bound tests under MPI and MOSIX. The results of these tests show the advantage of using MOSIX over MPI. At the end of this paper, we present the performance of the executions of those tests, which showed that in some cases improvement in the performance of MOSIX over MPI can reach tens of percents.

Keywords: High performance computing, performance evaluation, Linux cluster, MOSIX, MPI, process migration.