[Bioclusters] Mosix and Blast

[Vsevolod Ilyushchenko]

Joe,

Thanks again!

Could you please also take a look at my original questions at the beginning
of the thread? Briefly, they are about:

1. Will Mosix migrate commands that logically should not be migrated, like
ifconfig?
2. Is MFS/DFSA a striped network file system like PVFS or something more? I
am somewhat confused by its /mfs/nodename... syntax. 
3. Is it easy to alternate the cluster between Mosix and non-Mosix configs?

Also, after reading some more info on Mosix, two other problems:

4. It's not clear whether Mosix migrates processes using shared memory. 
(AFAIK blast uses shared memory.) Even if Mosix migrates such processes, is
it possible that different threads of the same blast invocation will wind
up on different nodes?
5. Mosix docs underscore that it migrates processes to the nodes where they
perform heavy I/O. However, I wonder whether it will be beneficial for our
mode of work: we run many invocations of blast (almost) simultaneously
until we run out of CPUs, and the processes all read the same database when
they start. What is the best way to utilize Mosix here?

Thanks,
Simon
-- 
Simon (Vsevolod ILyushchenko)   simonf@cshl.edu   
http://www.simonf.com          simonf@simonf.com 

The central message of Buddhism is not 
"every man for himself"!
				("The Fish Called Wanda")