OpenMosix Project Nearing End of Life

According to an announcement posted on SourceForge, Moshe Bar (the openMosix founder and project leader) plans to end the openMosix project effective March 1, 2008.

For those of you not familiar with the project, openMosix is a free cluster management system that provides single-system image (SSI) clustering or building a cluster from a bunch of ordinary networked computers. It allows program processes to migrate to machines in the network that would ultimately help run those processes faster. It is particularly useful for running parallel and intensive input/output (I/O) applications.

The official explanation as to why the project is ending was that the increasing power and availability of low cost multi-core processors is rapidly making single-system image (SSI) clustering less of a factor in computing. The direction of computing is clear, and key developers are moving into newer virtualization approaches and other projects.

Moshe Bar must have been happy with the way the project progressed with tens of thousands of installations done and many more projects started that incorporated openMosix into their own products.

The openMosix Auto-Discovery innovation enabled the development of Instant SSI Clusters and the project also taught others important lessons in Distributed Shared Memory.

SourceForge will continue to keep the openMosix source code on its site indefinitely, frozen as of March 1, 2008. The openMosix Web site will close on that date, and the openMosix-Devel List will close earlier, December 1, 2007.

Moshe Bar wanted to thank all of the users and developers who enthusiastically supported the openMosix project and made it such a success.