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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..."
What about cost? The cost (monetary, not time) of setting up a Linux cluster vs. a Mac cluster?
I think there are pros and cons of both clusters.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The Linux manual is a Beowulf cluster of Mac manuals.
This article sounds biased. The fact that a manual is shorter doesn't mean that it is a better or easier to install program.
In fact, as far as I'm concerned, I wouldn't go with a solution claiming to make computer clusters "easy" with a one page manual.
Besides, if you are going to have a cluster, you want cheap, off the shelf machines such as PCs with plenty of spare parts that can be customised to suit your needs : why pay for a good 3d graphics card in every pc if you are going to do number crunching !
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." Bill Gates,
Finally we may rejoice! For once Apple has surpassed the user-friendliness of Linux! Let the merriment begin!
"Ask me about Loom"
Honestly, I'm surprised. Yes, it's easier on Mac OS X - the company spent millions of dollars developing and refining an imperfect GUI that succeeds in bringing more transparent administration to a machine.
Whoo. That's not tough.
If linux is to make further inroads (and I by all means wish Apple luck in the same) against Microsoft in the server arena, contributors must work towards this goal. It's the interface, stupid! I don't care how many geeks' grannys can send e-mail from the command prompt, but the MCSE-in-a-box crowd aren't going to go for it if it isn't simple to set up. Reading a 200-page howto isn't going to cut it, especially with the level of technical writing skill out there....
Having used the old Nextstep API (which I believe have been ported to OS X under the guise of CoCo) I can say that they are well suited for cluster computing.
I remember Richard Crandall and the mathematica guy (Wolfram) using Zilla (an old Next distributed computing program) to crack the world's largest prime in the mid nineties...
Anyone know if Zilla is back on OS X?
Also the Gigabit ethernet on motherboad and the large 2MB cache on the PowerPC chips will go a long way on making these machines a good cluster.
It's been a while since I've done distributed computing (hey, I am out of acedemia) but OS X will hopefully make the whole shebang easier...
I can't comment on whether or not a Mac cluster is easier to create or maintain (since I've never used a Mac cluster), but I'd prefer a Linux cluster running PC hardware, because:
-- Initial build costs are much lower (dual Athlon 2000+ right now without graphics hardware is way cheaper than a dual G4 1GHz).
-- Maintenance costs are much, much lower. Anything goes wrong with a PC node, just swap out that part with another commodity part. Mac repair or parts replacement costs will eat you, especially if you start to have many, many nodes.
Plus you can modify bits of Linux if you need to optimize the behavior of your cluster for the sort of computing you do, which you can't do with Mac OS.
My $0.02.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Wow, imagine one of these clustered machines running ALL BY THEMSELVES!
Strange, it doesn't seem to have the same comedic value this way...
... is the ease of use. Tech Professionals can't make a living supporting the platform.
... However, he hasn't done any consulting yet because all of his clients have figured it out for themselves. All they need are a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software. Getting it up and running is as simple as installing the software and configuring it through a couple of dialog boxes. ..."
Before someone accuses me of saying they never break, always work flawlessly, and the like: They do need support. It's just that the ideal career envoirment is when there is more work than workers. An underwhelmed support staffer soon finds the company wants him to help unload pallets in his spare time.
When all the IT staffers know one platform, what do you think they're going to recommend come upgrade time?
From the article:
"
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Sounds like an old Apple commercial called "Manuals" (sorry, I spent ten minutes Googling and still did not come up with link to the ad) that showed an IBM PC with a stack of huge binders thundering down from the sky into a heap next to it... then panned over to the 128K Mac, as its single, thin manual fluttered down like a feather in comparison.
~Philly
Finally Apple has hardware (powerful G4s and gigabit networking) and software (Mac OS X with preemtpion, protection, and a mature TCP/IP stack) that can really handle this sort of this.
I mean, this shit flew under Mac OS 9 and 400MHz G3s. Now we have Mac OS 10.1 and *dual* GHz machines with Gigabit ethernet. I can't imagine the power.
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.
Why don't you just make 10 louder and make 10 be the top number...and make that a little louder?
Available from here
I think...I think it's in my basement. Let me go upstairs and check. -M.C. Escher (1898-1972)
Cost of 10 good Intel machines to install Linux on... trivial (pobably about $15,000)...
Cost of 10 good Highend Macs, (about $30,000)...
Both are in the trivial range compared to the costs of time, energy, etc.
There is a more important question, which machine gives you the most bang for your buck?
We know that Photoshop runs better on the G4, what about your operation?
If the Mac gets a 2:1 performance advantage, then the costs are equal. If the Mac out-performs it regardless, you get an advantage.
For the moment, let's assume that you are getting real machines that are tested, not parts off of a sketchy vendor from pricewatch.com. If you are really trying to build a parallel computer, you want real systems, not junk that may or may not work.
This also rules out eMachines, or home computers. You are basically in the Compaq Workstation, Dell Workstation, HP Workstation, or IBM Workstation area. You aren't setting up a bunch of Presarios.
This macintosh clustering app (pooch) is both an amazing piece of technology and a remarkably stupid idea, from what I can tell (in the article and the ONE PAGE of documentation provided).
All you have to do is write an application for pooch (that, for example, does your linear algebra homework, or perhaps pingfloods slashdot.org) and run it on all the cable/dsl mac machines that now run pooch because of slashdot.org, and enjoy the amazing technology!
Now, if what I have outlined isn't possible, please let me know; this is all from the article and the incredibly meager documentation I have read. But as usual, it looks like the security ramifications for this are enormous, perhaps worse than other common and incredibly boneheaded ideas, such as auto-updating software, and executing code in e-mails from random people...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I don't think very many people will choose to use the Mac for clustering _even if_ it is easier than other platforms as this article seems to suggest.
Macs are luxury computers. They are generally more expensive than their custom PC counterparts, and Apple limits the BTO options that you can use to reduce the price of their G4 towers.
If you wanted to cluster 10 G4 towers, you'd be paying for 10 superdrives, 10 3d accelerated video cards, 10 snazzy cases etc etc. Most people building a cluster will want each system to only have the components they need: processor, memory, network IO, backplane bandwidth etc. You won't want to pay for components you won't use (like 9 extra superdrives).
So unless Apple decides to offer special deals for those who want clustering, I think the economics of the situation will work against Macs and infavour of x86 PCs running Linux where the economies of scale conspire to lower component costs to the minimum.
We are talking about Apple and Macintosh here. Try an orachard :)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
And don't note that the manual (if it's the Beowulf book everyone cites) is mostly about how to PROGRAM it (e.g., includes an intro to MPI).
was building a super computer supposed to be easy? Chances are if you have a reason to build one you would have the technical ability to follow a 230 page user manual. Then again, maybe "Super computers for dummies" would have a bigger audience than I'd expect.
thirsty*i^2
"Ya I finished that last week, it just doesn't work"
The Zila program came on NeXTstations and NeXTcube and was aimed at providing networked users with such solutions by multithreading the apps objects over the network. :-)
Guess the solution you discuss about is actually inherited from this one
Trolling using another account since 2005.
... he's fairly uninformed on clustering. He claims that you have to have the exact same kernel version on a linux beowulf cluster or it grinds to a halt... ... this is, of course, bullshit. Our 96 node cluster here uses different kernels.
And that's just a single example of his lack of experience with clustering...
* Firewire connection networking
* Gigabit ethernet networking
* Numbercrunching processors
Ditching the screen and stack large numbers
in racks might be a problem, how about power
requirements?
Speaking for myself, I only need one screen and
one computer with a diskdrive but I'd like to
see better ways of using multiple computers
(as long as any one program can crash one of them)
Step One: Plug them in.
Step Two: Turn them on.
Step Three.... there's no Step Three! There's no Step three...
MOSIX clusters are a one-liner to set up, for example. I challange Apple to beat that!
I'm not sure about Compaq's One-Stop Linux Clustering. I've never got it to compile. But, assuming it can be made to work, I bet it'd be pretty decent, too.
Last, but by no means least, clustering in the Real World tends to be through PVM or MPI, which are platform-independent. Hardly anyone uses OS-specific clustering, because hardly anyone but high-energy physicists ever develop large clusters in the first place!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you need a high-performance computing environment, you need a batch-process mainframe and an elite band of nerds to run it. You plebs can just wait patiently outside the machine room.
If you want a toy, go get one of those piddling PCs.
I just love ridiculous condescesion!
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
How is a Mac "easier to set up" in a Beowulf cluster than a group of identical PCs?
I can see where the author might make a point to say that the Mac is nice to use for a cluster because Mac hardware doesn't really change much from box to box, but the same could be said for a group of equal-built PCs. Infact, most real-world (re: not your bedroom.) Beowulf cluster nodes are NOT loosely conglomerated machines with wildly different capabilities from node to node. Most clusters are planned out well in advance, in where each node is precisely equal in terms of its hardware and horsepower.
"Its easy to set up because all of your nodes are the same with a Mac!!" ceases to be a valid "advantage", when the same can be said of a group of SGI O2 boxes, a group of Sun E10K boxes, or a group of lowly 386 PC boxes.
Besides, "its see-thru orange!!!" shouldn't top your list of reasons to purchase Macs for your cluster. You buy a pile of 1U rackmounts, because you normally don't have a whole room to dedicate to a cluster. (duh)..
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
It looks like my "Can you imagine a Beowolf cluster of these" post in regards to the G4 story a while back actually was on topic.
~ now you know
As usual, I've been had from the lack of journalism on slashdot and the sites they point to; thanks for pointing out that the real manual is 46 pages long, and not ONE. :)
My imagination originally came up with a similar scenario, and then it all FIT! That's why the POLAR ICE CAPS are MELTING! It isn't global warming; it's a BEOWULF CLUSTER! I figure they have TUNNELS connecting the supercomputing centers to the ESCAPE ROUTES for the ARK.
Work on the ark continues...
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Ethernet has very high latensy at about ~10 milliseconds. Projects like PAPERS and the KLAT2 use the parallel port to connect compute nodes because of the much lower 1 ms latency.
Ok, no parallel port on Macs... but I wonder how do Firewire ports perform?
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Are you feeling lucky, punk?
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
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.
You think the P4 price/performance is bad, G4's are insane
USC Macintosh Cluster Running the AltiVec Fractal Benchmark achieves over 1/5 TeraFlop on 152 G4's and demonstrates excellent scalability.
KLAT2's complete results are: Rmax=64.459 GFLOPS with 64 Athlon 700MHz with 128MB PC100 CAS2 SDRAM
So a 1 tflop apple machine would cost about $440,000 in hardware for 152 G4 1000mhz -vs- 270 Tbird 1400mhz at about $160,000.
The difference, $280,000 could certainly hire someone literate enough to read the long linux manual.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
"A good use for these [ancient] machines is to recycle them and one way to recycle is to create a bigger faster machine with them."
Not if your primary concern is getting the most FLOPS/$. 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.
It would be a really good idea to make clustering easier, but there is a trade-off between easiness and performance. Making the creation of clusters easy ("a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software.") by only talking about the easy-to-use software and not optimized network topology (correct me if i'm wrong but the Beowulf handbook probably covers a lot of that) will definitely keep performance quite low.
BTW. on the wired site it says:
while almost the first sentence in the 1-page-pdf says:Do you have any no-biased (i.e. not from apple) figures to back this up? Or are you just talking out of your ass?
Building a true multi-user environment (I mean with multiple people at multiple machines) isn't all that easy. I doubt support costs are really less.
I've seen people say this before. But personaly doubt it's anything other then random apple hype (like the 230 page manual vs the 1 page PDF, even though much shorter beowulf docs exist)
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
If you read the one page pdf file, it assumes you already have a network of OSX boxes set up. The same thing in linux would look like:
.rhosts files on very node /etc/hosts files
Requirements: Linux Network with rsh enabled, preferably with firewall and IP Masquerade.
1.) Download jobmanager and bWatch rpm's
2.) Do a rpm -Ivh *.rpm
3.) Add list of nodes to
4.) List all nodes in
5.) In a terminal issue: jr -q [process command]
Viola! your distributive computing!
! == goatse.cx
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file
...could this just means Apple left out 229 pages of important information?
I mean who cares how many pages a reference manual is? I would rather have a complete manual than an incomplete one.
I Heart Sorting Networks
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Meanwhile, documenters have been developing a "What to do with a linux beowulf cluster" list. That document has grown to 230 pages. The corresponding mac list has come up with one idea (And it fits on a 1 page PDF file): "Create a system that allows us to use Photoshop to edit super-high resolution pictures of Natalie Portman eating hot grits."
(j/k!, and, btw, I'm using a Mac right now. :-)
--You will rephrase your request for me to go to hell. Goto statements are not acceptable programming constructs
The point isn't flexibility: sure you can be more flexible with a Linux-based cluster. You can tweak and tune a Linux-based cluster to meet your specific needs. This is why Google uses such a cluster.
The point isn't about cost: the real difference between a decent name-brand PC and a Mac is negligible. In the case of these Mac-based clusters, since the clustering software is just another app, a Mac-cluster can be setup and torn down quite readily. You come into the lab on Wednesday to find your workstation has been appropriated for the cluster.
The point is accessibility! If you're a physicist in a small school looking to model some complex interaction, you can rent some computer time from somebody (expensive), build a cluster (very expensive, because you'll have to hire somebody to do it--physicists aren't likely to be Beowulf experts), or use the Mac clustering software (expensive, because you'll have to buy the machines if you don't already have it, but you can do it yourself, quickly, without much bother).
Accessibility! It's what keeps Apple in business. This is another example of it.
I'm pretty disappointed in the posters who knock it, because it strikes me that they are a bit put out that they won't remain the Technical Elite because they've got the spare time to read the 230-page Beowulf manual.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Requirements: Macintoshes running OS X 10.1 or later with proper connections to the Internet
"Wow, I know a couple of friends on the 'net who have Macs, if we all install this will we build a distributed system?"
Those instructions are pretty flimsy, I seriously doubt it would work in disseperate IP address (like, a guy in India and a guy on AOL aren't going to be able link up just by installing the software). And even then, without some information on building the actual network you aren't going to get much performance in problems that require much crosstalk.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Every time I walk by a Windows lab, you should see the "CLUSTER" they have going on in there! ;c)
Answering my own question, I found this PDF on google about the performance of IEEE 1394 (Firewire). It says that Firewire can have latency as low as 125 microseconds, and bandwidth as high as 50MB/sec.
So why not network a cluster of G4s together with firewire?? Seems like it would perform much better than ethernet.
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
I DL'd and read the manual. It really does seem just that easy. It costs $100+ per node, but you pays fer yer time & headaches, doncha?
The faster the machine and traffic the better of course, but you could do this with the cheapest iMac ($799 new, ~$400 used) or a bunch of cubes (banking finally on their close packing ability) if you want Altivec in the mix.
Gosh, a reason to make a headless iMac2 - that would be quite the aesthetic eh? Seventy six of those snuggling on a ping pong table...
Communication can be over Airport, too - so you can imagine ad hoc Mac Clustering begin setup during the first half of every Jobs keynote - you know, the part where he just says stuff - to go thru all possible iterations of the product to be intro'd in the second half of the keynote...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
... for scientists like myself, this is a very nice thing. Not all of us in the sciences are tech-savvy... I'm probably the one in my 5-person research group who understands the most about *nix. For those of you who don't realize this, many research scientists have to work hard to get their grants and outside money.
So, what does all this mean to us? As an atmospheric scientist, having some serious number crunching power is mighty helpful. Weather modeling is quite the processor intensive task, and then interpreting the results can take years after all the computing is done, including further computations and visualization routines. To put it shortly, we can easily tax our computers.
So, now you know that we need computing power, but money is a premium for us in many cases, so why shouldn't we just get some cheap Intel boxes and *nix cluster them? Well, we could, but then we'd need to hire a systems admin. Someone who is tech-savvy enough to keep everything running decently well for us. That requires another person who REALLY understands what's going on in many cases, which is another salary on the payroll. For us, it all ends up balancing in the end. The $5-10K that we save in clustering our 8 Intel boxes over the Macs is eaten up in one year or less by the guy (or woman) who has to set up the whole thing. So, for us, the ease of setup and use is something that can translate into some good savings and we don't have to worry as much about having to rely on another person to save us if something goes wrong. That's the benefit of simplicity for us.
I agree that it is important to know, as one person said, "The nature of the beast", but that's something that takes time to do, and when you're not being paid to learn about how to cluster computers, but to figure out how the atmosphere works, then things like "The nature of the beast" are just further complications. I would rather have something that I can slap together, know that it works, and get back to my work, without the interference of others if I don't need it.
And that brings me to another rebuttal, about someone mentioning that if you buy the Macs, you're also going to pay for all the extra Superdrives and video cards and all that. I say to that, "Good." That way, if the cluster doesn't need to be used, then I don't have a bunch of mostly useless boxes sitting around... or if a collaborator comes around and needs a computer, I can just remove one of the computers from the cluster and let them use that for as long as they need. The point is that there are advantages and disadvantages to each setup. Now you've heard some advantages and why the scientific community might care about this. Remember, not everyone here can compile their own kernels and not everyone cares about being able to do that. Some of us, thank the deity of your choice, actually want to do something with this power and not care how it works in depth. To each their own.
-Jellisky
Photoshop is optimized for the G4. That was my point. We're not clustering Quake here. We're talking about special purpose applications that do scientific calculations.
If you application does better on the Intel, you are likely better off considering a Linux cluster. However, if it isn't much better, you might be better off with the Mac cluster by adding a few more machines to compensate... depends on the costs of time.
If you are running an application that, LIKE Photoshop, does better on the G4, you will see the price performance favor the Mac line. That's my point.
If this market was a decent size, I bet Apple could get some really competitive cluster systems. It would be nice to see an Apple dual or quad G4-1 GHz, with a CD-ROM, ATI Rage 128, and Gigabit Ethernet for the scientific community.
They could make the machine without PCI slots and fit in a 1U case for OS X processing goodness.
However, the reality is that the extras (better video card, Superdrive, etc.) don't add much to the Apple's price. However, the right form factor could make them tremendous cluster machines.
Alex
Obviously, you know very little about the Macintosh. You should learn a bit more before you go spouting off flames.
The software used to accomplish the clustering for AppleSeeds is Mac MPI, which is based upon the *standard* for parallel computing, MPI. The reason that the PDF doesn't talk about programming MPI is that there is no need for redundant documentation. Go find a book on MPI if you want to learn to prgram to that API.
And yes, I will get quite far telling you it's easier to upgrade Mac OS X to its latest version/. Thanks to Apple's Software Upgrade control panel program, this can all take place automatically according to any schedule you desire. Two clicks of a mouse is all it takes to set this up, as opposed to spending quite a lot of time figuring out how to use the incredubly arcane "apt". In fact, AFAIR, Software Update is now set to operate automatically by default.
Gee, I didn't realize that particle physics simulations involving millions of particles wasn't a *real* application...
The fact that your comment has been moderated up to four (so far) is simlply an empiric demonstration of the lack of knowledge of most Slashdot readers.
Are you saying uninformed idiots have trouble getting consulting gigs?
:P
It's to bad I havn't got mod points, I'd give you +1 funny. Thanks for brining a smile to my day
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
Well, hey, I can write a massively parallel distributed computing manual in _one slashdot comment_!
Requirements: Any machine supported by the seti-at-home client and some form of internet connection.
Installation: Download and install the client.
Select a parallel application: Easy! Already done for you!
Select nodes: Not your problem!
Congratulations, your computer is now part of a massively paralell computing network.
What? You want to do something else? Well... there's a 560 page manual... you know, parallel computing isnt that easy.
There is a difference between a quickstart guide and reference manuals. Comments such as that are just silly.
Of course, the article goes on to describe how they switched from applescript to tcp/ip... followed by the amazing 'they can transfer bigger chunks of data between nodes but their latency is less' which 'balances it out'. I find the conclusion that it is no harder to write for multiple processors (clusters) than it is to write for two processors (SMP) rather interesting too. Apparently he's got his hands on some damn hot networking technology, because last I looked the memory bus in an computer was a bit faster than your average network, which makes the problem quite a bit different.
Oh, well, someone has apparently been overdosing heavily on those one page quickstart guides.
a 1 page pdf - I love that kind of stuff. I knocked up an Appleseed cluster at work just for the fun of it - took my about 20 minutes. If only I had an application... Clustering for the rest of us!
That was classic intercourse!
>"It took NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory two weeks
> to put together a 16-node Linux cluster." he
>added. "I could do the same thing in less than an
>hour."
Then JPL was either building the systems from whitebox components, or is completely incompetent. I built a 20 node cluster in about 1.5 days, including the OS install on all of the nodes.
>Dauger added that Linux clusters are extremely
>fragile: If all the machines in the cluster
>aren't running the same version of the kernel,
>everything grinds to a halt. By contrast, a
>Macintosh cluster can be made from a mix of G3
>and G4 Macs running Mac OS 9 or X.
Excuse me???
My cluster is currently running 2 different linux kernels (2.4.18, 2.4.9), two different processing architectures (alpha and x86) and I occasionally throw an SGI O2K into the mix. Sure, the x86, alpha, and SGI binaries need to be compiled seperately, but it hardly "grinds to a halt"
>Dauger said Mac clusters have better bandwidth
>than similarly configured Linux clusters. They
>can transfer bigger chunks of data between nodes
>but their latency is less (The individual bytes
>of data are transferred less rapidly).
Huh??
And now let's look at the cost.
I can build dual athlon nodes for about $500/cpu
Let's assume his claim of 70% faster is true (I doubt that numberbut anyway). Can he build G4 nodes for $700/cpu?
And I quote "But according to Dauger, Linux clusters require a PhD to set up and to run."
Yeah, I guess there wouldn't be any qualified people amoung those running Tokamak fusion simulations or 100 million mutually interacting particle simulations.
A diskless linux system is cake to setup and as far as different kernels are concerned, the article is clueless, you can use LamMPI to mix different platforms (ie sun,sgi,intel linux, alpha linux) in a single cluster.
Disclaimer: I have a Ph.D.
nohup rm -rf ~/. >& zen &
You are attempted to determine the value of X.
I will increase my wealth/happiness by $10000 with computer A. I will increase me wealth/happiness by $9000 with computer B. If Computer A and B both cost $3000, I buy A. If B only costs $2000, I am indifferent. If B only costs $1000, I buy B. I determine what gives me the most value.
However, in this case we are comparing two clusters, one of x86 machines running Linux with one of Apple PPC machines running OS X. In either case I am buying many computers.
I need to do X operations per second. How much x86 hardware would this take? How much would it cost? How much Apple PPC hardware would this take? How much would it cost?
You are right that MOST computer buyers look at the price and not the benefit. Almost ANY productivity increase from the Apple makes it a good choice, even if it costs an extra $1000-$2000 for the machine.
However, in this particular case, we are discussing clusters. We are buying a certain amount of computer power. We should compare the variable costs of power ($X/gigaflop, or whatever unit you want to use), plus the fixed costs of setup time, and compare.
Alex
Much of OS X is closed source but Darwin, it's unix based core, is not. If doing a darwin port doesn't float your boat there is always OpenBSD or NetBSD or even Linux ports that will run on your IIsi cluster.
Just have all of your OS X clients boot off of a disk image on a Mac OS X Server machine.
http://www.apple.com/education/k12/networking/diff er/index.html#macmanager
I recall, back when CD-ROMs were fairly newfangled, the "manual" that came with the CD, if it was a dual-platform disk, often offered an interesting contrast.
The Windows instructions would go on for pages, discussing running the installer application, how to get the right drivers, etc.
The Macintosh instructions were usually:
I never understood why Apple didn't market that advantage heavily.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Everyone here seems to be suggesting that the manuals indicate nothing. "Apple has weak docs!" seems to be the summary. But can we entertain the notion that perhaps while 1 page is too short, 230 pages is far too long? If so, is this because the people who wrote the manual are not professional authors, and got too wordy? Or is it because Linux just isn't usable enough?
And whatever you think, isn't it reasonable to suggest that making Linux more intuitive and the manuals more succinct might help rid us of idiot lusers who won't RTFM? They won't really go away, but if we actually take usability seriously, perhaps developers can get half those people to solve their own problems. Wouldn't this be a good thing? I guess that's a rhetorical question -- I am sure it is a good thing. I spend my entire workday building apps for people, and one usability tweak can mean the difference between 20 nagging people a day and 2. My team even has blacklisted a couple people in the company, whose projects are always time-sinks to build and time-sinks to maintain. Why? Because those people are control freaks who won't let us fix usability errors, and my team ends up spending their days on support. If you can build something intuitive and usable, both the users and the developers will be much happier.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
spending quite a lot of time figuring out how to use the incredubly arcane "apt"
IMHO, if it takes you more than 1-2 minutes looking at the apt-get man page to figure out how to use it, you have problems. It wouldn't be difficult to define a menu option that does just that in your favorite window manager either. Just because it's a command line program, it doesn't mean it's difficult to learn or use.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
If, on the other hand, you want a toy that can run a fractal program really fast (perhaps povray too) and don't have a real application then this Mac cluster is probably what you need.
What like Maya rendering? Wonder if they've thought of this at Pixar? Imagine that a made to order RENDERFARM! No, no one would want to do that.
What if it is just turtles all the way down?
You've come to the right place.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
The size is what really kills them.
A 45U rack will hold 45 1U dual-CPU systems. Even more of the server-blade type systems (280 of the Compaq in a 42U rack).
The only way to rackmount a G4 that I can find is at Marathon Computer. A set of replacements for the "handles" for $225 or a whole new case which is 4U but is $550. Given a 45U square-hole 19" rack, you could squeeze in 11 dual CPU G4s.
I don't care what your performance fantasies are about the G4 systems, they're not more than 4x faster than dual x86 systems.
They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file.
Yes. Wonderful. This says nothing. This is one of "those" statistics. The Linux "how to" could be 230 pages because it not only tells you how to set it up, but gives you advice on customizing, creating optimized programs, hacking the kernel, and FAQs covering every single problem or question you might have.
The Mac PDF might be an almost blank page that says, "Call tech. support." Furthermore, why mention that it's a PDF at all? Are you saying that it's somehow better to use a proprietary document format (e.g. Proprietary Document Format - PDF, get it?) instead of plain text? Is the information somehow MORE relevant because it's in PDF?
Please. I've seen neither, but all this tells me is that someone wouldn't know a relevant comparison if it widdled on his shoes and stole his wallet.
Jake
Dating: while( 1 ){ call_girl(); get_rejected(); drink_40(); } return 0;
I browsed through it briefly when KLAT2 was announced on /. - but didn't come across the PAPERS stuff.
That is a cool project - even cooler was WAPERS - parallel clustering using modified parallel port switchboxes and custom cables - cheap interconnect hardware, to say the least! Even PAPERS didn't look that hard to implement (basically the same kind of system, but using AND gates to tie everything together, resulting in a "safer" system less likely to burn out "non-compliant" ports) - plus you get cool blinking lights!
Hmm - here is an idea - imagine making a PAPERS interface on a "per-machine" basis that fits into a 5 1/4 inch bay (like a bay bus device) - basically, split up the PAPERS box, then build custom interconnect cables (might need two cables per box?) - a real nice custom high-speed interconnect.
I need to look further into this interconnect, and see how it fares against others - cool...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
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.
-
Linux has the endless instructions and most windows games I try install themselves just by putting the cd in.
What I find interesting is that someone creating, say, linux cluster server software, doesn't 'market' it using a kde install and administration tool. they could have a command line version as an add on for those that need it.
Ah yes, of course, what if you don't like kde, think it sucks and have fvwm instead. Yah, probs.
Its a difference in mentality.
Ease of install/setup vs some other way like just the way it use to be.
J
The ability to use a CLI says something about your intelligence
That you're stubborn, stuck in a rut, and afraid to try out new things?
I really don't understand the whole CLI fetish in places like Slashdot. I use the CLI when necessary (admin work on *nix boxen) and the GUI when necessary (my main workstation is OS X).
They're just different, neither is better.
--saint
OH, that's rich..."Mac administration just doesn't scale."
That must be why in any large Macintosh environment you'll find far fewer administrators than in comparative Windows or Linux environments.
Pixar is not Apple, even if they are led by the same person.
.
It's interesting, all the comments I've read so far, including yours, seem to deal with this as a dichotomy between Linux/Intel and OS10/PPC. Don't forget you can run Linux on PPC. For a high performance dedicated cluster that would definately be an option I would look at.
Of course, there are situations where the Mac software has advantages that will really shine. Like if your "Cluster" is really just the lab machines at the college, acting as a cluster when not being used for DTP and Video editing or whatever. In that case the ease of setting this up with Mac OS10 would be a real plus.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
10 good Intel machines will not cost less than $10,000. For scientific work, I don't consider eMachines or your grey-boy solutions a "good" system.
So, I took the bait... I went to Compaq's site and spec'ed out an equivalent workstation. Note, I'm not souping up the video card or CD-ROM like the Apple workstations. No need to waste money.
Compaq Evo Workstation W6000, Intel Xeon 2.00 GHz/512K processor, dual processor... Upgrading to 512MB RAM. $3521.00. Note that this machine only has 10/100 networking. The Apple has Gigabit. This should matter in a cluster.
Dell Workstation 530. Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz x2, 512MB RAM, and an upgraded sound card (Dell won't sell a dual-proc workstation without an $80 soundcard upgrade... weird). Dell did let me downgrade the video card annd monitor... Price: $3878.00. Unlike Compaq, I could buy the Dell workstation with Linux (supported) instead of NT and needing to swap OSes.
Next I went to Big Blue. They push Linux, they should sell me good Linux workstations. When I bought my last round of Penguin Computing machines (to run OpenBSD and Linux) I looked at IBM first...
IBM's only dual processor workstation, the IBM Intellistation M Pro 6850 Tower. With a second 2.0 GHz Xeon processor, $5218.
Real computers cost money. Flaky machines that hardware lock from time to time do not. You can't compaq the Apple workstations to the bottom-barrel systems.
In fact, at $1300 for the lowend iMac (700 MHz G4), admittedly with a silly flatscreen for this project, or $2300 for the midrange (933MHz) G4, Apple hits some good price points for this.
Look, the new G4s (in the 933MHz and 1GHz-dual models) are sporting a 2MB L3 cache! That's damned impressive. A 2MB L3 cache should make cache misses SO infrequent that the slower memory bus speed is irrelevant.
Look, if you need lots of power, you used to need to stop millions. You're not going to cut corners on your machines. You're looking at $3500 for an Intel dual-Xeon based solution or $3000 for the dual-G4 based Apple solution. Sure you get an unneeded Superdrive, but who cares? When the project is over, I bet you everyone in the lab is happy to take one of the Superdrives home...
Geeze people, get a grip.
Apple's G4 workstations are not the same quality as the computer you have in your room in your parent's house. These are real machines with:
Gigabit Ethernet (very significant for a cluster, and unlike the PC's 32-bit, 33 MHz bus, real machines like the Apple, Compaq, or Dell workstations have 64-bit OR 66 MHz (sometimes both) PCI busses so you can actually USE the Gigabit Ethernet.
The Apple's L3 Cache has 2MB DDR SDRAM at up to 500MHz, this is much faster than the 266MHZ DDR in PCs and comparable to the PC800 RDRAM in the Dell/IBM workstations. Sure the System RAM is slower, but a 2MB L3 cache makes this less relevant.
The Superdrive, Firewire, and Video cards are all unnessary here, but they are actually really nice features if these machines will be reassigned as desktop machines when the project is over. You could buy new PowerMacs with the G5s ship within 6 months and reassign these as desktop machines. The real workstations are the same. You $45000 cluster of crap machines won't take you very far. They are trash when replaced, and if the machine hasn't been QC'd? Well, time to explain that your project needs to start over.
Come on people... Quake != scientific computing
Isn't that a concidence. I just came from a Mac discussion forum which was discussing the same linked article on the Mac Head site.
I show up in Linux city and what do I find? Well, I find a lot more messages, but that doesn't mean a thing.
All I have to do is take the ones on the Mac board, switch Max and Linux, and do the same here. They're interchangeable.
The Wintel chappies are bug eyed with glee and laughing it up as us dumb kiddies.
Heh. Lotsa Linux types haul an iBook around. And lotsa Mac sites run Linux on their servers. Does that suggest any thing? Maybe we should check out these other guys, maybe?
Why are the penguinites and mac heads banging? Maybe.....just maybe, there's a little objectivity here in 10% of the posts. The others are either ill informed or prejudiced.
Yeh? Well I posted about the same dumb message you just read on the mac head board too.
heh.
Would you write only one page of documentation for a word processing program? Or a spreadsheet app? Or how about a compiler/development suite? Gonna learn the whole language in 3 paragraphs, huh? There are some aspects of computing it is just stupid to condense to that level, and clustering computers for shared processing is one of them.
Dyolf Knip
It's not your fault, because you probably didn't know this, but the USC Mac cluster didn't cost anything near $440,000, and it didn't have any 1000 MHz. G4's in it.
At the "Macs in Science and Engineering" user conference at Macworld, they gave the general specs. of this cluster, and all of the machines were dual processors, but of different hardware generations. Although the fastest machines were dual 800 Mhz. on 133 MHz. bus, the majority were slower dual 450 and 500 Mhz. machines with 100 Mhz. buses.
With the fact that all were dual, and ignoring depreciation on the older hardware, the cost would be at most $220,000, If you were using Dual 1 GHz. G4's, it would still be only $220,000. My notes are on my laptop, but I believe that the actual cost of the USC cluster was less than $200,000.
Also, I assume that you think that the 270 uni-processor T-birds will scale performance linearly as well. I doubt it would only cost ~$600 per node as you would have to use Myrinet or some other fast fabric, and with three and a half times as many nodes, the latencies, hardware, and administration cost would be crippling. I have the same cost argument if you use dual Athlons, as the boards are quite rare, and the node count is almost double the Mac node count.
Your price/performance assertions don't stand up!
-- Len
All of a week ago, I went to a talk where the man, Dauger himself, got up in front of a bunch of professors and explained why Mac clusters were the best thing in the world. The Wired article reads just like his presentation. He even had a copy of the Beowolf book at the presentation, and handed out copies of his one page manual. There is no comparison. His manual says, basically, to install Pooch and reap the rewards. I found something interesting. The USC cluster that was mentioned was our Language Center Lab (I'm a student at USC). They ran a fractal benchmark. The thing that I found interesting was this, and maybe someone can help me out here. The language lab doesn't have any dual processor machines, and doesn't have clock speeds anywhere near 1 GHz on any of the machines. It's my understanding that all of these Macs pump out about 1 GFLOP each. There are 56 machines in the lab. 1 GFLOP * 56 machines = 56 GFLOPS peak. Dauger's benchmark said the cluster was pumping out 223 GFLOPs. What am I missing?
Two words:
Virtual PC
Pooty tweet
Beowulf was predated by "Zilla.app", which shipped on NeXTStep 2.0. Richard Crandall used Zilla on any workstation that was idle, anywhere on NeXT's network (idle being defined as "the screen saver was running"), to find the 13 Fermat number, among other things.
So, this kind of (relatively) low-cost clustering began on Mac OS X's predecessor.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
These Xeons feature 512K of L2 Cache. Sure there are Xeons with HUGE amounts of L2 cache, but then we are hitting the $10000 price range. These are workstation machines, not server machines.
I can't compare the Apple's to the P4s... P4s don't go dual processor, so the PPC G4 wins here. I can't get a Dual proc P4.
Athlon? None of the vendors I checked have Athlon workstations, so they weren't in consideration.
However, after realizing the lack of Athlons, I remembered that Penguin Computing has a line of Athlon based workstations.
I went to their website, and priced out an Athlon MP system, the Tempest 210MP Workstation.
With 2 Athlon MP 1900+, not really competetiive with the new 1 GHz G4s, but close enough for our comparison (and matching your assertion that they are in the same league as them). With 512MB PC2100 RAM, and upgraded to the Gigabit Ethernet card (they have one, might as well try to be fair), and my workstation price is $2707.
Congratulations, we have a winner. A Athlon MP 1900+ (running at 1.53 GHz if I recall?) with similar specs at the Apple Workstation comes in $300 cheaper. The Apple has some advantages, the better video card and Superdrive are nice features when the machine is recycled as a desktop machine, but for now they are superfluous.
What is the point of my work?
You're all full of shit. Apple's computers are extremely price competitive. They are cheaper than Xeons from the real vendors with similar specs (Xeons had faster RAM, equal L2 cache, no L3 cache, and no gigabit ethernet).
Apple puts out a really competitively priced Unix workstation to Linux workstations from major vendors.
Apple puts out really competitively priced consumer machines (iMac/iBook) compared to Wintel machines from major vendors.
You can choose to use an Apple solution or not, but stop spreading the bullshit about Apple being more expensive.
What most of us hate about Apple is that they make it impossible to unhide them, to get into the guts of the thing and change it as we see fit
/Applications/Utilities/Terminal, and launch it.
On any machine running Mac OS X, go to
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
File an "Enhancement/Feature request" at bugreporter.apple.com. The more we get, the higher the priority.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
To answer the question of what a Mac would be used for, the answer is quite a lot. Most cluster-based stuff is homegrown applications, which can be written for OSX as easily as most OSes. But beyond that, there is actually a huge call for rendering farms for programs such as After Effects and Maya that film companies use to create films (more importantly, the films I actually want to see, the ones where things fling through space and explode, not the ones where things are passed around a coffee table while people discuss important issues of sexual politics).
I know Linux just had a big win with Dreamworks, but Macs are huge in F/X industry. And if clustering brings new avenues to cheaper special effects, that means more special effects. And that is just good.
As for it being easier then Linux, it probably is. No point in crying about it, let's get a Beuwolf-out-of-the-box solution. I agree that Macs aren't customizable enough to my taste, but this doesn't mean there can't be a default configuration of BW that would work immediately and could be tweaked later.
Ah but see, the Mac's don't need to be the same and it's still just as easy. You should be comparing setting up a bunch of random Mac's and a bunch of random PCs. Even if you have identical PC's that's not the only advantage. The big advantage is that you don't have to go off and configure a whole heap of stuff, you just drag and drop the program you want, select the nodes to run it on and click start.
Perhaps you should try actually setting up a Mac beowolf cluster before claiming it isn't easier...
There's a few people saying the cost of a Linux cluster of similar computing power would be much less than a cluster of Mac towers. That is completely wrong, and here's why:
1.) Power vs. cost. The G4, with AltiVec-enabled MPI code, can blast data through in 128-bit chunks. Steve Jobs loves to term this the "Velocity Engine", and it is much, much more powerful when doing solid number crunching -- exactly what would be taking place on these clusters. It's not as amazing for day to day operations, but the capability is there to quadruple the data flow of a traditional processor when doing clustered computing. Typical AMD/Intel processors can just not do this.
2.) Maintenance. This is key. I maintain a Linux cluster and have worked with others in the past, and wonderful as they are, they require lots of maintenance. It's pure and simple math. You probably built all 16 or whatever nodes with individual parts made by various companies, and inevitably, each of those elements will have problems. This makes debugging and fixing hardware problems unbelievably painful, especially when you also have to deal with multiple parts vendors. When you use Apple Power Macs, ALL hardware problems can go through ONE support source, and that's Apple. Plus, they are pre-built, tested, and refined in Apple's R&D labs far before they make it to your cluster room. This saves such incredible amounts of time and money, it definitely pays for the extra cost of the computers themselves. I wish I could explain to you the sheer pain of keeping a cluster alive which constantly had one part go bad here and there -- but one part, sixteen computers, each with eight or nine significant custom-attached parts... well, it meant a lot of troubleshooting time, a lot of replacement time, and having to deal with far too many different companies to get the parts and support I needed.
3.) MacOS X. Clustering under previous MacOS versions was, despite the best efforts of AppleSeed, absolutely reprehensible. The operating system was simply not designed to do massive computing projects, and it was not efficient at all. Definitely not worth it despite the work of the pioneers in the field. With OS X, you now have a BSD operating system, one that has done clustered parallel computing for over a decade. MPI, with AltiVec enhancements; gcc with multiprocessor compilation support, you name it, it now runs under OS X and, with the operating system natively supporting the G4, it does it DAMNED fast.
"What the heck do you know," you might ask. Again, I maintain a 16-node Linux cluster for a plasma simulation group at the University of Colorado, and am also the CU campus rep for Apple Computer. I am well-versed in both OS X and Linux, and their scientific computing environments, and have experience in clustering in both environments. I am in the process of establishing a scientific computing initiative at CU, and I am doing it on behalf of Apple because the G4s (and soon, G5s) are simply the best platform for multi-platform scientific and high-intensity computing.
The best saving grace from a sysadmin's point of view, is that I will never have to worry about maintaining the variety of parts in those damned Linux clusters. The operating system is wonderful for scientific computing, yes, but there's simply no cost-effective way to purchase and maintain Linux-based PC hardware that could ever compare to the Mac. From an overall perspective, and this is definitely the most important aspect, those who are using massive parallel clusters of computers need their data crunched fast, and the G4 processor, combined with AltiVec-enhanced code, is simply the fastest way to crunch data, straight and simple.
I hope that clears up the issues for people, because that's how it is. Just the facts, ma'am.
Ryan Bruels
Apple Campus Representative
University of Colorado, Boulder
bruels@mac.com * 303-332-5434
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
It's x86 machine code for:
MOV AX,4C00 (note little endian)
INT 21
or, in terms of the old DOS days, exit(0). The fear comes in when you see it, know what it means and realize just how full your brain is of stuff you are never likely to use again...
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
You're right... drat those units...
the latency on ethernet is about 10 microseconds, not milliseconds... on the parallel port it's 1 microsecond... on firewire it's 125 microseconds... which means ethernet is better than firewire and parallel ports are better than ethernet (from a low latency view)
There are 10 types of people in this world, those who can count in binary and those who can't.
My point exactly.
Two clicks in a control panel for 1024 computers is too hard to manage, you need better remote access.
However, I am sorry. I was under the impression that you had to pay for the OS X.1 upgrade and that it came on a CD.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Having been an administrator for an environment involving thousands of diverse UNIX machines in use as desktops, I think I know a bit or two about keeping systems updated.
Netbooting machines is alright, however in the High Performance Cluster I worked with we were very bandwith constrained, and having the machines not netboot eased the network congestion considerably.
Anyway, It's not hard to update your unix machines every day... just put an update script in root's crontab. Need to do something for every host?
for host in `cat /etc/host_list` ; do ; done.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
raytracing (which I think is what maya does) is one of those trivially parallelizable tasks -- the data set is so much smaller than the computation, and the inter-cpu communication is trivial. You don't need a cluster for these, and in fact many raytracers do ship with renderfarm software to use spare cycles. This sort of thing is trival enough that I wrote a java version for a 3 credit graphics course over a weekend, just so I could play with my renderer faster.
Photoshop filters are less obvious, both because schlepping bitmaps is expensive, and the ammount of communication needed is hard to predict in general (although the com. patterns may be easier, I suspect). I wonder if many such filters wouldn't be at the other end of the spectrum, requiring too much communication per computation to be feasible even over a fast network.
http://www.daugerresearch.com/pooch/PoochManualX.1 .pdf
Well, Dauger Research is touting their 1 page manual and right they should. The simplicity in setting up this cluster is pretty amazing. The link is to a 46 PAGE technical document that goes into much greater detail. Still a couple of hundred pages shorter than the referenced Linux manual.
Now, if people would stop bashing Apple's documentation and realize that it is Dauger Research who wrote the documentation for Pooch, I'd be very appreciative.
Pooty tweet
I think more to the point is you can use Macs that your organization probably already has. If you're at a school whose got a big pile of Macs in the library or graphics labs or something you can turn them into a super computer by night and still have them usable by students during the day. The same can't be said for the highly tuned Beowulf all the systems need to be idendical and within four feet of one another or the doppler shift over the copper wire will fuck something up system. Beowulfs are cool and in some cases are very effective (when you have the money to buy and build a new system) but if you need to use stuff you already have (and you've got Macs) the Appleseed is a good choice.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Uh...why do you need to know the nature of the beast in order to run a highly parallel program on a computer? Do you need to be an expert in the construction of computer clusters in order to be an engineering grad student who wants to run a CFD program you wrote for your thesis? It makes alot more sense to ask your local cluster guru "hey I want to run this CFD program I wrote in FORTRAN on your cluster, any particulars I need to know?" and the cluster guru says "hey just make sure it complies with yadda yadda...". It is going to be far more likely people know how to write heavy computational jobs in some language than it is for people to know the intricacies of building and maintaining a cluster. It seems like a common misconception among Linux users that user and administrator ought to be interchangable words.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Actually even this is off. ApplesScript since OS9 has had network support. You can make an AppleScript that will run on every Mac node on your network and do whatever task you want it to. It isn't too difficult to have this script run Software Update or grab the installer for the latest OS upgrade off a file server and update the system. OSX makes it even easier because you can use cron to run a shell script at whatever designated time to do whatever. Any administration you're going to do with Linux on 1024 nodes can be ported to OSX with I don't imagine too much difficulty. If that isn't enough remote access I don't know what is.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Cost of 10 good Highend Macs, (about $30,000)...
Reading Beowulf in a PDF file on a cluster of these: priceless.
The original 128K Macintosh came with a thin manual and a casette tape (which you played along with a movie running on the screen). This was enough. One of the first Mac commercials showed a PC, with a stack of books falling on the table, and a Mac, with the thin manual floating down.
However, they made the same error that you make: thinking that people select for ease of use. They don't. This is what happens:
The sum total of this is what I call "the Acolyte effect." An Acolyte is someone studying for the priesthood. Computer acolytes are attracted by the pseudo-mystical nature of software; learning its ins and outs is for them a rush. The choice of computers and software becomes a social hierarchy.
I like Macs. I just wish I had the money buy a new one, so I'm not an Apple hater, but I do prefer typing to point-and-clicking. Even if Software Update is easy to use, one would still want to read up a little on it to find out what it can and can't do and to know how it can bite you. (Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I like knowing a little about the operation of a program that updates the system software before I start playing around with it.) How is that different than looking at the apt-get man page for a minute or two?..not countless hours. It's not hard to understand and none of this has anything to do with ego, so why even bring it up?
Besides the scientists that would make the best use of clustering are much smarter than I am, so if I can 'get it', they certainly should be able to.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
If you choose to run a Debian based Linux distribution, apt-get is not an obscure tool. It's probably the main reason many people choose to run it. It makes upgrading the system extremely simple and is very easy to use. Besides, how did typing in something from a CLI become something that people use to boost their ego? Being able to read simple online help and typing a command in doesn't make someone a person better than another. It's not rocket science.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
Realisticly speaking, how many cluster users are using their cluster for an application that commercial-off-the-shelf software will be available for?
"The software used to accomplish the clustering for AppleSeeds is Mac MPI, which is based upon the *standard* for parallel computing, MPI."
There are a laundry list of parallel computing standards. MPI is on the list. Hint: MPI is supported directly on linux. I wonder which one has the bigger software repository?
"The reason that the PDF doesn't talk about programming MPI is that there is no need for redundant documentation. Go find a book on MPI if you want to learn to prgram to that API."
Yes. But the poster was trying to indicate that the literature comparison is a bit stacked, no? =)
"as opposed to spending quite a lot of time figuring out how to use the incredubly arcane "apt"."
More gooey distributions (e.g. Red Hat, mandrake, etc.) include gooier automatic updating tools.
(But, presumably, if one has difficulty comprehending a simple debian command-line utility, one is clearly not qualified to understand source code for a particle physics simulation coded in a high level language, and should be thrown off the project, right?)
Using SMP machines doesn't REQUIRE you thread your applications thus fucking up your MPI performance. You could have your program fork itself as a separate process or just run a separate instance from another directory or some such and the kernel on the SMP system will load balance and keep each process running on a different processor. This approach is of course going to work alot better with Monte Carlos than differencial equations. Anyway to answer your question if you use pooch you can use any library you've got available on your Macs. Just like building Beowulf apps you load the nodes up with whatever libraries you need for the application and it will go ahead and use them as needed. If you're using OSX you can use Cocoa or Java as an object passing system to get data from somewhere to somewhere else although this isn't exactly ideal for heavy math applications.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Presumably, most of the annoyance at Apple in this community comes from the whole whacking-unauthorized-clone-makers-with-a-big-stic k attitude it adopted.
Very hacker-unfriendly, and more monopolist than Microsoft. In PC land, there are almost always at least three suppliers for every major component. (e.g. CPUs: Intel, AMD, VIA, Transmeta; Motherboard chipsets: Intel, AMD, VIA; etc...)
You may have a point about the jealousy, though. Although my hardware is neither beige nor ugly -- and each of my components was selected at my choosing -- I have to admit that it would be kind of neat to mess around with OS X for a while. Now, if only Apple would let down its sometimes-whimsical sometimes-Microsoft-esque-monopolist schizophrenia for long enough to realize that it could really change the world and make a killing at the same time by entering the PC OS market... But, alas; Star Trek was crushed long ago in favour of the misguided hardware company vision.
Heck... If they leave the price/performance ratio wins and the majority market share to PC land, the Dells of the world will gladly reward Apple with all of the "cover of Time" success it wants. =)
Does MOV AX,4C00 set the exit code then?
Yes. Function 4C (in AH) is exit. 00 (in AL) is the exit code.
Don't know about Apple IIs but I still remember the "SYS 64738" command from the C64.
Fear: When you see B8 00 4C CD 21 and know what it means
Your price and performance arguments are BS straw-man arguments, since dual athlon MP1900+ systems in 1U of space are available for under $3500.
Face it, since OS X macs have been better than anything that runs on Intel for any application.
And I believe that when I start seeing real business data centers with garage-racked Macs running in them. Until then its only in your mind.
2xAthlon 1900+, 3.5GB memory, 292GB hot swap 10KRPM SCSI disks, dual ethernet controllers, 1U rack chassis: $9071 at penguin computing.
2xG4 1000, 1.0GB memory, 292GB hot swap unknown rotational speed SCSI disks, 1 ethernet controller, 2U rack chassis: $8687 at GVS.
Looks like the Athlon kicked its ass. 3.5GB DDR vs 1GB PC133: Athlon wins. 2xAthlon CPU vs 2xG4: Athlon wins by a LONG LONG WAY. 1U vs 2U: Athlon wins again.