Macintosh Clustering

HiredMan writes: "Wired is running an article comparing the set-up and admin of Linux Beowulf clusters versus Mac based clusters. Slant of the article is that the Macs are easier to set-up, maintain and are more flexible. They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file. Dauger Research of former Appleseed fame is mentioned as well, of course. MacSlash is also covering the article. Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly..."

Comments

maya, photoshop, etc. on a cluster?

[goto11]

Wouldn't it be great if "plug and play" clustering became a reality. Say your office mates are out to lunch, or there's no one scheduled to use the school computer lab for the next hour and you want to render the effects for you three-hour iMovie, or you want to perform batch despeckle on a few hundred inages in Photoshop...
Nothing against Linux (I use it myself for a router), but a three-day setup for Beowulf clustering isn't a great deterrent if your calculations will be going for a month or two.
The type of clustering we're talking about here is something that could potentially appeal to the average SOHO or school, where they have five to 500 general-use Macs that have processor cycles to spare.
My question is this:
What would it involve to make Mac OS X and every program that runs natively on it to be able to take advantage of clustering right out of the box? If they can natively use multiprocessing, how much of a leap is it to patch the OS to natively support clustering?
Not only would this be great for techies, but it seems that this would be a great incentive to volume sales from Apple, where they now generally only get one or two Macs per site and the rest are Wintel workstations.

Hardware == Cheap. Humans == Expensive.

[hobbs]

I've just read the article, and added my grain of salt for bias, but most people here fail to realize that hardware costs are *very cheap* in relation to human costs. If what they say is true, it's worth the extra price on hardware.

False economy

[Weasel Boy]

"A good use for these [ancient] machines is to recycle them and one way to recycle is to create a bigger faster machine with them."

Not if your primary concern is getting the most FLOPS/$. Given that a brand-new $1000 computer will be something like 10 times as fast as your old ones, at the same power consumption, it doesn't take very long before your new computer pays for itself with the money you save in electricity not running 9 additional machines.

Consider:

150 Watts (low for a PC, probably average for a Mac) x $0.10/KWH x 24 Hr/day x 30 day/mo. x 10 machines = $108 per month. Your $1000 new machine will pay for itself in less than a year, from electrical savings alone.

Of course, this assumes dedicated compute servers running all the time. If you run the cluster software as a backgound task on desktop machines with many users, it's a different story.

Swapping isn't the solution

[alexhmit01]

If you have a scientific cluster, you don't want to be swapping things out. You don't want to take nodes offline because a video card fried. You want a system that is going to work.

I just priced out some Compaq Workstations yesterday and compared them to Apple Powermacs (Apple's workstations) for doing some OpenGL game development.

Apple Powermac with dual monitors and the upgrades we'd want... $5k. Compaq Workstations... $5k.

In the price-conscious area, Apple's iMacs/iBooks offer a good solution at a reasonable price. You can't compare Apple's workstation line with your "look ma, I built it myself" machine.

Apple does QC. You don't. You and your screw driver does not equal scientific requirements for reliable and predictable. If a node fries, you likely need to start over again. You can't just try to fix the damage.

Linux is great, OS X is great. They are very different UNIXes in different markets.

Alex

Re:Cost?

[Luti]

Cant you cut the $4792 for LCD's down to $599? Why do you need 8? Can't you use one and just unplug it from the head when you to diagnose the other machines? Also why LCD's? Can't CRT's be found for under a $100 now? I'm not a Mac fan, I prefer LinTel, but this solution seems to make tons of sense...

Luti

exactly.

[rebelcool]

So many people who cannot comprehend that many people simply do not have the time or resources to manage a unix box (or several), but have the ability to manage easier systems like windows or macs.

The money saved by using a free OS is quickly eaten up by the salary of someone who has to make them run smoothly, which is damning if you're a small business with only a few employees, or in your case, a research group.