Mosix clusters can take various forms. To demonstrate, let's assume
you are a student and share a dorm room with a rich computer science
guy, with whom you have linked computers to form a Mosix cluster.
Let's also assume you are currently converting music files from your
CDs to Ogg Vobis for your private use, which is legal in your
country. Your roommate is working on a project in C++ that he says
will bring World Peace. However, at just this moment he is in the
bathroom doing unspeakable things, and his computer is idle.
So when you start a program called FEHLT to convert Bach's
.... from .wav to .ogg format, the Mosix routines on your
machine compare the load on both nodes and decide that things will go
faster if that process is sent from your Pentium-233 to his Athlon
XP. This happens automatically - you just type or click your commands
as you would if you were on a standalone machine. All you notice is
that when you start two more coding runs, things go a lot faster, and
the response time doesn't go down.
Now while you're still typing ...., your roommate
comes back, mumbling something about red chile peppers in cafeteria
food. He resumes his tests, using a program called 'pmake', a version
of 'make' optimized for parallel execution. Whatever he's doing, it
uses up so much CPU time that Mosix even starts to send subprocesses
to your machine to balance the load.
This setup is called *single-pool*: All computers are used as a
single cluster. The advantage/disadvantage of this is that you
computer is part of the pool: Your stuff will run on other computers,
but their stuff will run on your's, too.