Mosix:

After the acquisition of about a dozen crappy computers, I decided I finally had enough to start clustering some. After doing a little research into beowulf clusters, I found what was called MOSIX. Now there are currently 2 different types of mosix, MOSIX and openMosix. Now I have heard that openmosix is pretty good itself, but I chose to stick with Mosix because I found more HOWTO's out there on the net. The HOWTO I found for MOSIX to be most informative was ironically on an openMosix site, although the site claims to soon be replacing this with openMosix. This HOWTO can be found here. But for someone who didn't know anything about patching or compiling kernels, this took a little effort to figure out everything that had to be done.

Table of Contents:
1. My complete verbose HOWTO
2. Why did I take the route I did?
3. Software Packages for a Mosix cluster
4. Related Sites and Other Help

Section 1: HOWTO

Here is the complete HOWTO from intially installing the machine, patching a kernel source, compiling the new mosix enabled kernel and setting up the mosix software.
If you have any success stories with setting up a MOSIX cluster using this HOWTO, then let me know at doug. I would love to hear your experience, see some pictures and so on. You'd probably even get mentioned in the news about your cluster!

Section 2: Why I chose this method

There are a few decisions I made here.
a) Go with the debian distro. After learning to use the debian distro, after getting over the initial shock of a seemingly unfriendly installation process, especially compared to the easy go gui of redhat's installers, I found debian to be a very powerful system. One of the main aspects I like about Debian is the apt-get system. Now, in the HOWTO, I will make mention to a possible problem which could be encountered with the method I used, but that will be discussed more in detail in that part of the HOWTO.
b) Go with the MOSIX package, and not openMosix. There are actually a couple reasons for this. At first I was looking around, I got a lot of conflicting information, which is very unfortunate for those like me who are starting out fairly fresh. I looked around for packages of mosix and openMosix to install, and found it very difficult to find on the net older versions of the mosix packages. OpenMosix on the other hand had files all over. Now getting them installed was something else. The best HOWTO I found used mosix and not openMosix. So I started out with mosix. Now after playing around for a while, I discovered that I was required to patch my kernel first before I could install and use the mosix software. I initially was simply trying to install the mosix software on a (unpatched) kernel of appropriate version. After then finding the patch, and the source, (the patch had to match the kernel version) I was off and shoved into the world of fixing the problems and getting the damn thing that is supposed to work, working.
c) Go with debian. Yes, this has already been covered, but there is yet another reason why I made this choice. Now, as a little background, Debian has no official tech support. They do not have hired people who take in requests all day and try to solve people's problems. Debian relies on the people to provide support. This huge network of almost everyone involved with Debian is quite successful. They have hundreds of mail-lists dealing with a wide variety of topics. So I signed up for the debian-beowulf mail-list and was off with a great deal of support. They proved to be very helpful in answering a variety of questions, even ones that were slightly off topic, including basic things such as compiling a patched kernel.

Section 3: Software packages for a Mosix Cluster

One of the nice things with Debian, is the apt-get program. All of the software for installing the patched kernel (after the initial install to get the computer simply running) is available through this program. The software pieces I got through apt-get were: (Note that this may change in time as packages get updated, just make sure the patch is for the right version of the source)

  1. ssh (so I can work remotely from a comfortable setup in front of my regular computer, and not cramped on the floor where the current Node-to-be is setup) [version irellevant]
  2. less (this is simply a matter of taste, I prefer less to more, and it makes looking through man pages a lot easier) [version irellevant]
  3. kernel-patch-mosix [version 1.5.7-2_i386]
  4. kernel-source-2.4.17 [version 2.4.17]
  5. gcc [version relatively up to date]
  6. make [version relatively up to date]
  7. libc6-dev [version relaticely up to date]
  8. mosix [version 1.5.7-2_i386]

Also, on one node, you will most likely want a gui frontend, along with some other softwares to run, view and access your programs. These are not listed in this list as this list is simply for a working node which will likely only ever get accessed through a migrated process.
On the other side of things, packages for a running cluster, I have found that hard to come by. One piece that is quite interesting that I found is Kandel. This is a Mandelbrot Set fractal renderer. It uses the KDE frontend, and this will be covered in the HOWTO. So far I have yet to find any other software packages which exploit the ability to share processes. Note that you don't necessarily need a program designed to run on a cluster to get improvements in performance. Example: Apache and web hosting. Apache uses lots of processes to serve the website, so in effect, you get a sort of load balancing as it sends processes to other machines. Not exactly the same thing as the load balancing you find in server farms today, but you can definitely get a boost.

Section 4: Related Sites and Other Help

First of all, let me direct you to the site where you can sign up to the debian-beowulf mail-list. Please read through the information on that site before signing up, and please do not abuse it. It is a very good tool, and would be a great waste if it were abused.
Other sites I found with help:
www.MOSIX.org
openMosix.sourceforge.org
lyre.mit.edu/~powell/debian-howto/beowulf-start.html - Great place to start. Lots of information regarding where to start looking, what can be done, what is being researched in clustering, design and tools.
howto.ipng.be/openMosix-HOWTO/x364.htm - Good site with lots of information regarding installation with many distros, history, requirements, installation, administration and a variety of other things.

Good Luck