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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."
Does this work on the small scale as well, like OpenMOSIX? We have a few G4's at school that could benifit from clustering.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
It'll be interesting to see if I can make this work with the stacks of old LC520s in my garage. I've been wanting to cluster them for a while. If Xgrid will work on those, Mac just saved me a ton of work. Not that I wasn't going to have fun with it....
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
Now every single story posted on slashdot for the next 6 months is going to have a comment of "Imagine an XGrid of these!" The old incarnation was slowly dying too...
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
And when I feel like it, I'll volunteer x% to non-commericial stuff like SETI@home."
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the 21st century pimp.
"What do we get for 10 teraflops?"
"Anyting you want!"
"Anything?"
"Anyting!"
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
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.
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
From my own inexhaustive observations, Apple gives consumer stuff "i" and geeky stuff "X", hence iPod, iApps, iMac, iLife etc against XServe, XCode, XGrid, etc.
To be frank I've always wondered about Apple's name syntaxes. When the Mac IIx and the SE/30 came out - improvements of the Mac II and the SE with then top-of-the-line 68030 processors - it seems they really should have gone with Mac II/30 or SEx. Mac II/30 sounds like a third grade joke about chinese dentists but the Macintosh SEx would have probably made them billions.
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
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
"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...
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
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!
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
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 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)