[Bioclusters] blast server on OpenMosix cluster

[Farul Mohd. Ghazali]

On Wed, 10 Dec 2003 hong.zhang@research.dfci.harvard.edu wrote:

> I am working on set up a blast server on Debian/OpenMosix cluster with 4
> nodes. Actually it is totally new to me. So is there anyone can give me
> some advice? Thanks.

I've used OpenMosix in the form of ClusterKnoppix some months back to test
it out. The setup was very easy, boot off the CD, configure some settings
and the rest of the nodes boot off the network. Applications are
automatically load balanced across nodes.

While configuration and actual use was very easy, performance wasn't too
great. I think the main reason was that OpenMosix dynamically migrates
applications to the different nodes to automatically load balance the
system thus the overhead of migration for long running jobs suddenly
became apparent.

To be honest, we didn't try to optimize it much and went to implement our
blast cluster with SGE and hopefully soon mpiblast.