dynamic loading of so's on clusters
Peter Bowen
pzb@datastacks.com
Sun Sep 30 20:10:00 GMT 2001
On beowulf clusters, it in not uncommon to have a master node with a full
set of libraries, while the compute nodes have few, if any. One way to
accomplish this is by using BProc, the beowulf distributed process
space. BProc is written by Erik Hendriks at Los Alamos National Lab,
adn is used by Scyld, Paralogics, and Linux Networx in their cluster
products. It adds a small amount of code to glibc to provide a fallback
mechanism if the library can't be found on a compute node. The fallback
is to ask BProc to get the library, if possible, from the master node.
Right now the patch is small, and specific to BProc, but other systems,
such as mosix, may want similar functionality in the future.
It would be nice to see something integrated into glibc to
support single system image clusters. I am attaching the bproc patch as a
starting point. If there is a better way to implement this functionality,
I would be interested.
Thanks.
Peter
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