# <a name="Distributed_Computing"> Distributed Computing </a>

Mach was originally designed to run on SMP systems. Later, it was extended to be a distributed OS. A group of workstations with Mach can act as a single powerful SMP machine. Thus, Mach is also called a Single System Image (SSI).

The Mach micro kernel provides a good infrastructure for distributed computing, including thread migration, inter-thread communition (both locally and remotely), load balancing and fault-tolerance. The Hurd, thus, has great potential for distributed computing. Before further development information is available, let's see a related project for Linux kernels, OpenMosix. You can reach it at:

* <http://www.openmosix.org/>
* <http://openmosix.sourceforge.net/>
* <http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmosix/>

OpenMosix makes patches to various versions of Linux kernels to make them "distributedly-enabled". However, since the Linux kernel is monolithic, patches should be updated with each new version of kernel. That can be a nightmare, with regard to the pace at which Linux kernels are being developed.

By contrast, distributed computing can be more easily implemented in the Hurd as various servers. Efforts will be taken to make it happen.

-- [[Main/LaudneyRen]] - 29 Sep 2002

Various grammatical fixes and tidying up. -- [[Main/JoachimNilsson]] - 29 Oct 2002