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.

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