Moshe Bar, the project manager of openMosix, is scheduled to speak at the Silicon Valley Linux Users Group meeting on Wednesday, February 5, 2002. The meeting will be held at Cisco Systems in San Jose, California, at 7PM.

As clusters are expanding from high performance computing into business applications, single-system-image clusters quickly are gaining importance. In a short time period, openMosix has gained thousands of installations around the world and enjoys an enthusiastic and strong developer community. In this talk Moshe Bar will explore the internals of openMosix, the technology's application fields and sample uses.

openMosix is a kernel patch and does not require changes to user space applications. Once you have installed openMosix, the nodes in the cluster talk to one another, and the cluster adapts itself to the workload. Processes originating from any one node, if that node is too busy compared to others, can migrate to any other node. openMosix continuously attempts to optimize the resource allocation.

Because all openMosix extensions are inside the kernel, every Linux application automatically and transparently benefits from the distributed computing concept of openMosix. The cluster behaves much as does a symmetric multiprocessor, but this solution scales to well over a thousand nodes, which can themselves be SMPs.

Moshe Bar is the former co-project manager of MOSIX and the current project manager of openMosix. He has authored several books on the Linux kernel and clustering and is co-author with Karl Fogel in the classic CVS book OpenSource Development with CVS. Moshe has been a senior monthly columnist at BYTE for the last four years and wrote regular kernel columns in the past for Linux Journal and other publications. In 2001 Moshe Bar became CTO of Linux clustering start-up Qlusters, Inc. Moshe has a M.Sc and Ph.D. in computer science and teaches advanced operating systems topics at Tel Aviv University and at the United Nations Atomic Agency research institute ICTP in Triest, Italy. He also is a permanent researcher at the Italian National Institute of Particle Physics.

SVLUG meetings are free and open to the public.

SVLUG also organizes monthly installfests on the third Saturday of every month.

For directions and more information, see the SVLUG web site.