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."

Comments

small scale?

[SHEENmaster]

Does this work on the small scale as well, like OpenMOSIX? We have a few G4's at school that could benifit from clustering.

Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch.

[antarctican]

Oh good, you mean I can actually talk about XGrid now after signing an NDA over 6 months ago? :)

We had the second installation of XGrid, the only other group using it at the time was NASA. I haven't had much time to play with it personally but we had our coop do some genetic sequence analysis using it and he was quite impressed. Plus the speedometer-like gauge measuring performance just looks soooo cool. ;)

Re:Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch.

[buckhead_buddy]

Back when Spindler ruled as Steward of Apple (well before the return of Jobs), I signed an NDA for an evaluation period with a piece of Apple hardware that was supposedly about 10-12 months from release.

The specs of the machine have been outclassed by modern standards, and the neat software features not made irrelevant by Mac OS X have surfaced in Mac OS X Server. But there were two very cool things about the case though that I thought were of the "Geez, that seems so obviously handy!" variety.

The gotcha was that it has never been released. I keep expecting new Mac hardware to one day come out with these two features but until that time I guess I'm still under NDA. Arrggghhhh!!!!!

Be glad your NDA expired with the release of the product. Otherwise you'd be burning with the image of that cool speedometer in your mind and unable to tell anyone about it. :-)

Re:Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch.

[laird]

Wow, usually NDA's are released either when the info becomes public knowledge OR after three years (or whatever). Lawyers never let me sign any contract that doesn't have an expiration date, because it means that they'll have to worry about it forever...

Re:Why limit this..

[laird]

"However when you can pick up Dell or Sun machines cheaper and more powerful than Xserve cluster nodes, it's more tempting to me to put a little effort into getting each one up & running as a node and enjoy the benefit of more power and a little effort, than simplicity and less power."

This might make sense except that Dell and Sun servers are slower and more expensive than Apple's. Unless you're talking about buying used servers on eBay or something, I suppose. But if you want scientific supercomputing floating point number crunching, the G5 is amazingly good...