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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."
Xgrid clustering is pretty neat. It doesn;t provide much int he way of an environment for parallel computing ala beowulf as of yet, but it is a great way of easily distributing batch jobs to a number of machines, and has a fancy pants tachometer to boot.
"Macs aren't cheap."
Oh, yes they are.
what a phenomenal idea. to take advantage of the idle processing power of machines that sit unused at least 50% of their time. virginia tech is just the beginning.
any college with a several ~25-machine labs can use this app to do supercomputer stuff, AND get the return on investment from normal users being able to utilize these machines during the day.
www.pixelectric.com
You wouldn't, you'd buy Xgrid. It's simple math and microsoft certainly figured it out a long time ago. The markup on a piece of software is anywhere from let's see, $200 divided by $0.15, what does that come out to? Or you could sell the equivelent in hardware, $200 divided by $150. And for some odd reason you can easily manage to sell the software orders of magnitude more times than you'd manage to sell the hardware.
Gee, I wonder.
I think that Virginia Tech would disagree with you on that last point there. There are not many applications that you could or would want to use 64-bit computing anyway so I don't understand your point. These days it's either DBs or number crunching. For the latter, having distributed system helps it even more.
But if you're not happy with your G5, you could send it to me. I'm sure I could use it to play Pong or something.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Having used POOCH, and having it work sporadically at best on a lot of different systems, I can tell you that the news here is, as is usual for Apple, that it's not the first system to do something, it is the first system to do it easily and the first not to at least moderately suck.
but then the question goes to: what would you rather have, innovation that leads to products, or innovation that leads to nothing? the latter can be more useful, when it is so innovative that it is simply too far ahead of its time, but i don't see microsoft having this. Apple's research has regularly turned out very new, creative and USEFUL applications and hardware.
That "high powered" linux server has dual 64-bit cpus, ecc ram, a 1GHz bus, two gigabit ethernet interfaces, is 1U, and has four-hour on-site service available, right? Cause I don't seem to see any such x86 servers available at any price.
Last time I looked, the absolute bargain basement price on a dual Itanium server was around $20-30K. Which makes that $3k look pretty tasty, actually.
Status: Job failed (task: failed with status 255). I suspect that was because I was trying to run it off an xgrid consisting of one G3 iBook, and it needs the velocity engine (though nothing of the sort was documented). However if that is the case it shouldn't have failed, it should have waited to run off of other computers and just ignored the G3.
I'm potentially seeing a situation where some well meaning non-compatible agent joins an open XGrid and flubs someone's whole job. There needs to be a way to not fail just because one agent can't handle a particular program.
Also I'd like to know how well the xgrid processes behave themselves when an agent is "Always available" but is working on other stuff. So far things seem to work OK.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?