openMosix User Space Cluster Daemon SourceForge.net Logo

The openMosix User Space Cluster Daemon is for use with the openMosix 2.6 kernel extension for single-system image clustering.

The concept behind omuscd (the openMosix User Space Cluster Daemon) is to provide a low impact plug'n'pray daemon that can determine sensible configuration parameters and provide a complete & concise range of functionality. The intention is to make it unnecessary to run any other cluster management software, to simplify administration tasks, and permit as much as possible of the cluster resources to be used for the primary task of doing useful work.

Development Cluster

The daemon provides process migration management and communication between networked computers running openMosix enabled kernels to construct a cluster. The topology of the cluster can take one of three forms. A controller/drone topology (head nodes farms out running processes to nodes defined as slaves), a co-operative peer to peer topology (a node running processes broadcasts a process migration request, a free node then volunteers to take the process), or a hybrid combination of the previous two topologies.

The daemon has a minimal IPv4 network usage (to keep bandwith free for that useful work). UDP Multicasts are used for cluster auto-discovery/auto-removal and general network traffic, avoiding the overhead of DNS queries, ARP requests, and establishing/closing socket connections. TCP connections carry specific node to node commuication where an infrequent but lengthy (relatively speaking) exchange of information is required, such as current resource availability. ICMP is used to establish node network state.

Console