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Myrinet Available for Mac OS X
KeithOSC writes "Looks like Apple may have one more step closer to real parallel computing. Myricom has just released its drivers for their high-speed cluster computing interconnect. I've been beta testing for two months now. With my findings, Mac OS X may be a real Beowulf cluster option. (Now, if Apple would just give us faster memory and PCI buses.)"
Granted Myrinet is not cheap, but it doesn't seem to make much sense to use expensive apple hardware and software in a distributed situation. Are the G4s still that much faster as to outweigh the costs? I haven't seen recent benchmarks. Is there evidenve that Apple hardware and OS X are great for distributed processing? If not, why bother?
Spencer Ogden
This is a great thing for research facilities where Mac has always held a strong foothold (along with academia) also when a *large* cluster is not needed, running MacOS would be a bit more friendly for researchers to administrate their own little 10 node beowolf...
I'm an AIX Systems administrator, and yes I do cry myself to sleep at night....
You can buy 4 dual processor Athlon rigs for every single processor Apple. Since a cluster's advantage is it's ability to create supercomputers from commodity hardware, why even attempt to use proprietary hardware? This is a dead end clustering approach. If you need double precision, use Alphas. Their cost is comparable to Apple, and perform significantly better, especially for number crunching (The term everyone used before "bioinformatics" became a hip buzzword)
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Spend 300,000 dollars on Mac hardware, and you will have a 100 node cluster of Dual 1Ghz machines. Spend 300,000 on a cluster composed of dual 1.533ghz machines and you will have a 512 node cluster, and $70,000 to spend on the additional time it would take to optomize your applications.
In other words, you can have about 6 dual athlons for every one dual Apple for the same price. Since there are absolutly no benchmarks where the G4 performs 6 times better than an Athlon, and clustering is about supercomputers made from commodity hardware, the Athlon is a much better value.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Not Just Because...
There are rumors Steve Jobs has started visiting major special effects houses, etc. Literally approaching the people who work there (and who have said they would love to be able to use a Mac from start to finish) and ask "what do you need from apple to make your work better (assuming that they think it would be done better all on macs, etc.)". From the replies I have seen (again, rumors): Atleast dual processors, quad would be nice, need a 1U rack case, faster bus, memory, etc. These places don't care about cost if it helps them get work done better (and isn't obscene) and actually saves them money.
The power required to run a full 1U rack of dual G4 machines (70 machines) is considerably less than that of dual AMD machines. When you are clustering lots and lots of these machines, that starts to really add up. And less power usage means less heat, so less AC cost. And those are just the rarely considered expenditures.
Apple is moving to make some big splashes in the Highend market. They now have an operating system that can be used in the highend market and the consumer market, at the same time. Which means applications can move from one market to the other easily, cross polinating etc. (iMovie bringing digital video editing to the masses, is something of an example).
I doubt these guys wrote the drivers entirely by themselves. This would require some very low level stuff, and lots of help from apple (because low level stuff is still being tweaked, etc.) meaning that apple had to partake in it. Apple probably initiated them to actually do this. Why? because in a few months, after the drivers have stabilized Apple will announcing products that will use it.
I think it's cool that apple seems to have a balancing point behind keeping a product a secret, but still getting field testing of their more obscure stuff. (Highspeed networking / clustering of this type is a foreign beast to their current hardware, and to the market that would be using them, because macosX has never worked with it before.) the same is true with BlueTooth. They showing you their cards, knowing they still have an ace up their sleeve.