CHAOS is a tiny (6Mbyte) Linux flavor, that will boot any 586/Pentium (or better) computer into a working openMosix node, without disturbing (or even touching) the contents of the local hard disk.

CHAOS aims to be the fastest, most compact, secure and straight-forward openMosix cluster platform available.

Why the name CHAOS?
CHAOS was a groovy word that ended in OS. This name also best represented the notion of an ad-hoc cluster constructed from nodes that may only ever provide a temporary / intermittent capacity to the over-all cluster environment.

The legacy project name has been retained for community consistency.

What is the purpose of CHAOS/openMosix?
CHAOS is built around the open source project openMosix created by Moshe Bar. openMosix, itself, is a piece of software that is added to the Linux Kernel, to allow many Linux computers to work together as a Single System Image (SSI) type cluster.

CHAOS is an easy way of creating secure, ad-hoc, clusters from any organisation's existing desktop PC investment; The easiest way for any business to harness its unused capacity, and to redeploy that processing capability to its most processor hungry applications.

What is a Single System Image (SSI)?
A Single System Image (SSI) is a type of cluster technology that aims to create a single large system that is a more powerful version of any of the smaller systems that it is comprised of. It could be considered to be the infrastructure equivalent to a fractal.

The popular alternative cluster technology is Beowulf, which involves a Parallel Computer Emulation software layer being applied to a number of smaller computer systems. The primary difference between the two technologies is that in an SSI, the application software that already runs on a regular Linux installation should not need to be rewritten in order to take advantage of the cluster's processing capacity.