Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on September 06, 2006 03:27 AM
I would consider both Condor and Open Mosix as "mature". Condor has been around and evolving for over a decade and is in use at thousands of sites. Similar story for Mosix / Open Mosix.
They are different. Open Mosix is more a transparent load balancing system, Condor is more of a batch queueing/scheduling system (as is LSF, PBS, Torque,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...). Which approach is "better" depends very much on your workload. Load balancing is often preferred when the workload is heavy with interactive or short-lived tasks, batch queueing/scheduling is often preferred for longer-lived batch tasks. Also, OpenMosix assumes a Beowulf-style dedicated compute cluster setup. Although Condor can manage a dedicated cluster, it does not make this assumption --- it can also manage across "grid" wide-area environements, non-dedicated desktop machines, meta-schedule across other schedulers, etc. But assumptions can simplify life if the assumptions apply to your desired setup.
As for why does start Condor as root: the answer is that you do not have to do so. But if you do start the Condor daemons as root, then Condor is able to run jobs on that node with the same UID as the submitting user (i.e. root is used for UID switching), and also Condor is able to enforce node policies even in the face of a non-cooperating job. (e.g. hard for management daemons to kill a job after X minutes if the job can just kill the daemons first!).
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Re:Is condor better than Beowulf or Open Mosix?
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on September 06, 2006 03:27 AMThey are different. Open Mosix is more a transparent load balancing system, Condor is more of a batch queueing/scheduling system (as is LSF, PBS, Torque,<nobr> <wbr></nobr>...). Which approach is "better" depends very much on your workload. Load balancing is often preferred when the workload is heavy with interactive or short-lived tasks, batch queueing/scheduling is often preferred for longer-lived batch tasks. Also, OpenMosix assumes a Beowulf-style dedicated compute cluster setup. Although Condor can manage a dedicated cluster, it does not make this assumption --- it can also manage across "grid" wide-area environements, non-dedicated desktop machines, meta-schedule across other schedulers, etc. But assumptions can simplify life if the assumptions apply to your desired setup.
As for why does start Condor as root: the answer is that you do not have to do so. But if you do start the Condor daemons as root, then Condor is able to run jobs on that node with the same UID as the submitting user (i.e. root is used for UID switching), and also Condor is able to enforce node policies even in the face of a non-cooperating job. (e.g. hard for management daemons to kill a job after X minutes if the job can just kill the daemons first!).
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