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Xgrid Clustering Software and Demo
no_demons writes "Along with a selection of other goodies, Apple also unveiled their Xgrid clustering technology from their advanced computation group today. Xgrid can turn a number of networked Macs into a supercomputer, detects nodes automagically via Rendezvous, and can run in or out of a screensaver mode. You can download a technology demo (including a BLAST test app) here."
Nope, it won't work on those. XGrid is based off of Apple's Rendezvous, which is OS X ( well, at least until someone ports it, seeing as it is open source. So, unless you plan to port it yourself, and to port XGrid as well ( if it is ever open sourced ), then you're out of luck. If this was a serious post that is. If it was a troll, then I bit, but you don't care ;)
And so we go, on with our lives
We know the truth, but prefer lies
Lies are simple, simple is bliss
OSX requires:
- PCI
- Open Firmware
- a PPC 603 or 604 or later
- oodles of RAM (64 minimum).
Running it on a legacy Mac - that is, anything older than a Power Mac 9500 - would involve somehow getting around these. You'd have to:
- write an Open Firmware bios for the machine and trick it into booting via it
- write drivers for the machine's onboard video so that it LOOKS to the OS like a PCI card behind a bridge chip (repeat for sound, network, etc)
- get a 603 or later (OS X 10.2 needs a G3 or later), some of the upgrades for 68K machines could only go to a 601
- provide for 64 or 128MB RAM on a machine whose motherboard is limited to 36. Oh, and endure the sluggishness of 72-pin RAM.
OS X is not OS 9 and it is not Red Hat.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
It isn't inherently limited to Macs... however, the only computers that they have written the client for is Mac 10.2.8 or better.
(From the FAQ)
Q: Can I use Xgrid with other UNIX-based computers?
A: The short answer is no.
The long answer is that Xgrid uses an XML property list protocol built on top of BEEP for all of its inter-computer communication and coordination, and because these protocols are open, it is possible a client, agent, or controller could be written to run on other UNIX-based computers and interoperate with Xgrid. However, no such programs have been written.
"If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn't be called research." - Einstein
I want to sell my processor time to a broker who will resell it on a day to day basis to whoever is the highest bidder.
Several companies tried this back in 2001 and discovered that the processor time on your computer is worth less than the overhead cost of using it. Sorry.
Read ClusterWorld and you can figure this out yourself.
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
It's running on my home network of 2 desktop G4s and one PowerBook G4. Looks and works great.
--
d a v e
d a v e
"Hmmm...upgrades."
What's more important is what it's clustering, 90 nanometer G5s. Apple and IBM are the first company to bring 90 nm processors to the market. Xserve White Paper
Okay, I'll bite. Microsoft, for all its failings to innovate in its commercial projects, has been churning out interesting research for quite some time in its various labs:
http://research.microsoft.com/research/topics/
Its a shame that so little of this work is making its way into products you can use, but them's the breaks.
I feel the need to add links, as I love old Macs (yay Bolo!).
First, here we have the tech specs for Apple's old machines, early PPCs and old m68k machines, including the LC series.
Second, here is the LC520 itself. It's about 10 years old, a 25MHz 68030 CPU, one cryptic expansion slot, no ethernet. No more needs to be said.
Strangely on topic, I collect old LC-era Macs to play Bolo over Phonetalk connectors. *G* Bolo is an old tank game, playable on almost any old Mac. Its creator is now working at Apple, on Rendezvous, which XGrid uses.
Ok, original post shoulda been modded funny or troll, but there are cluster solutions for old Macs, so here goes:
NetBSD/68k, supports 68k cpus and various free cluster architectures.
Appleseed, supports OS 8.6 - 9.x on PPC.
Quite a few older PCI Powermacs can be coaxed to run OS X 10.1.x using XPostFacto and some patience. Won't support XGrid for now, but the other free suspects will work.
Luke, help me take this mask off
64mb of RAM is oodles? wouldn't oodles be somewhere more in the ballpark of 1gb+? 64mb of ram is barely sufficient to run win98, let alone MacOS which prior to OSX lacked any reasonable form of swap without third party software.
The result was constantly running out of memory. And since pretty much everyone running on a mac requires lots of ram you'd run out of memory fairly quickly, often with no more than two or three applications running.
As for the sluggishness of 72pin RAM, I can only assume your joking, EDO ram was static memory and smoked compared to dynamic memories. Dynamic memory technology was cheaper, has bigger numbers (amusing that the faster it is, the more it needs rewritten and therefore the more it bogs down the processor and the more wait states while it refreshes). Static technology gets expensive when you talk anything much more than 128mb, while dynamic is cheap to 1-2gb.
Between processor bog and additional wait states and the fact these problems scale to the speed of the memory, it's highly debatable whether dynamic is overall superior to static. However saying that static memory is sluggish is insane.
Clustering databases has different issues/concerns than clustering computational problems. I wrote an article about database clustering a while back, available here, if you're interested.
Breakfast served all day!
Apple's Xcode already does this.
(From the Xcode website)
With theRendezvous-enabled distributed build feature it's easy to simply farm out your build by distributing compile workload across idle desktop machines or, better, deploy a dedicated Xserve build farm to do in minutes what would take hours on any single machine.
Launch Den Mother and Launch Den Puppy are a distributed computing application pair for older Macs. You can download a 68k version despite their claims of requiring a Power Mac.
Its not as automagical as XGrid and you will have to write your own multiprocessing code, but it is a way to do distributed processing on old hardware. Clustering a bunch of LC520s may not be the best use of time and electricity, but then who said that a hack must be cost-effective.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
AltiVec-based factoring program. Created as extension of original factor.c project at Next Software, Inc.
Not originally PPC specific...
Trust me. This is an inactive account. Regardless of what the
You might want to also point out that Virgina Tech went with G5's (not XServes) and the built the third best supercomputer for a super low price... they spent less money on the g5's than the would have for Dells and Sun boxes and got 4x the processiong power... oh and XServes is a very respectable "platform"
Actually, a G5 starts out at $1799. You are thinking of the Cluster Server XServe, at $2999. If you actually were to do even a little bit of research you will start to notice that in order to match the performance of these machines you will have to spend a lot more than the $1000 you quoted.
Remember you have to have:
Gigabit Ethernet (the XServe has 2 ports built in).. I think this will probably account for $300-$500 of that thousand right there
SATA
Very high performance memory systems (with ECC on the XServe)
FireWire800 (drives and networking)
PCI-X (can you say Infiniband?)
And if we are focusing on the XServe:
Hardware fault notification (very well implemented)
1U rack space (slide out drawer, including cable management)
MacOS X Server (so nice to admin)
I don't think you know what you are talking about. After all, Virginia Tech just hit #3 on the supercomputing list with a cluster of G5's, and everyone is talking about how cheap they did it. The guy behind the project did a lot of research and discovered that this was the best price, Dell didn't even come close (they gave them 3 tries to do so).
"XGrid is based off of Apple's Rendezvous, which is OS X "
No, Xgrid is based off of the Zilla project that ran on NeXT.
Zilla was acquired by Apple when NeXT was purchased.
Zilla was rechristened Xilla during development in honor of OS X.
It's now called XGrid.. and yes it is cool.
Now, XGrid includes support for Rendzvous.
Rendzvous is Apple's release of ZeroConf, an OPEN SOURCE ad hoc IP based protocol.
Someone else asked about running on other BSD's.
XGrid runs in user space. It isn't a kext (kernel extension). It probably could run on other BSDs without too much work, but it is a carbon app so you'd have to totally port the interface to some other GUI API.. and you'd have to port it from Obj C to something more common I'd guess.
Apple hasn't provided source (yet) though so I don't see anyone porting it soon. Maybe reverse engineering it...
other stuff... it apparently makes use of XML too but I haven't gone through all the docs yet.
I'm not feeling witty so bite me
XGrid does NOT need to run on Xserves. People seem to be drawing that conclusion from somewhere. You can use it on any machines capable of running OS X (10.2 though, I believe). The reason it gets quite interesting is because the average person can set up something somewhat powerful with the desktops laying around their house. I for one, have 5 Mac machines in my house that have lots of idle time. I could install XGrid and use that idle time efficiently to perform distributed tasks. (of course, I would have to figure out what to do first)
Boeing used to be one of the biggest Apple customers on the planet. I think Lockheed had the record for owning more than 50,000 Macintoshes. But Boeing was on that scale too. Boeing used to run a Macintosh training facililty at, I think, Shoreline Community College in Seattle. Now Boeing has surplussed a lot of their old macs...but the macs are beginning to come back. I do a lot of consulting for Boeing contractors that are showing interest in mac hardware. The problem is that a lot of software has yet to be made for OS X, like specific finite element analysis packages and CAD packages (AutoCAD, ProEngineer). These software packages require large amounts of (government standardized) testing everytime they are ported to a new platform. So even though they are already UNIX based, its not a simple matter of just getting the code up and running.