Apple Releases Xgrid Technology Preview 2

dark_lotus writes "Apple has announced the availability of Xgrid Technology Preview 2. This version improves on Xgrid's breakthrough ease-of-use by adding the most requested features, including an 'xgrid' command-line utility, support for MPI jobs, and a comprehensive Xgrid User's Guide, as well as numerous bug fixes. Groovy!"

Comments

Re:XGrid ala Rendezvous

[radicalskeptic]

I agree, Rendezvous is pretty cool technology--and it's the basis of Xgrid. However, I think they can improve scaling a bit.

I'm on a college campus that must have, oh, over 1000 Macs on it (entering students are required to purchase Macs now), and on 10.2 rendezvous used to take up 20% or more of my CPU usage (1 GHz G4). I ended up using this tip to turn it off during the worst times of day.

However, I will admit rendezvous is *much* less draining on Panther, and will hopefully keep getting more efficient.

Will come in handy in the graphics world

[ducomputergeek]

With the G5's, I've seen a huge shift back to Macintosh in the past 6 months by graphics and ad shops. (I am a technology consultant specializing in graphics systems) I know of several architecture firms in town that wish Autodesk would release AutoCad for the Macintosh so that they can take advantages of having all their development on one platform. Right now, most of the firms I work with usually have a couple Macs around for Final Cut Pro production. Some are still 100% PC shops that use Premiere, however due to the many problems with Premiere 6, several purchased Macs and never looked back.

Still, it should be interesting to see how this could affect the rendering crowd. Imagine being able to use a program like Maya then when everyone goes home at night, use all their workstations to help process a render job. That could save a lot of businesses a lot of time and increase their profits. I know because we have a 100 CPU render-farm we rent out to local businesses so they can get a jump on their next business.

Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world

[Quarters]

Imagine being able to use a program like Maya then when everyone goes home at night, use all their workstations to help process a render job.

That's been doable in 3ds Max for almost eight years now. The same for Lightwave, even back to the days when it was Amiga only. The software license for 3ds Max allows you to install it in a render-only mode on an unlimited # of machines. One machine acts as the queue manager and people can submit jobs all day long for submission to the renderfarm. The queue manager can maintain a time/date access list for individual machines and add/remove them from the pool as necessary.

Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world

[spaceport]

True, these other packages do this, but they can do so because the rendering engine is licensed to be used on as many machines as you please.

The reason you won't find this with maya, at least not in its current incarnation, is Mental Ray. Mental Ray is pricey, and they sure don't give it away. On SGI workstations, you pay for mental ray by the processor, not just by the machine.

Same thing applies to the other packages if you use them with other renderers. discreet does give you unlimited use of their rendering engine, but if you use Mental Ray in max, every render node must have mental ray installed and licensed to use. This dramatically changes the cost.

So while we may want this, and even if Apple would be willing to 'make it work', there would still be other hurdles to surmount.

Re:Oh Sweet Jebus! not Rendezvous!

[bob_calder]

The moderator obviously doesn't work with zero config network protocols. My personal feelings about them are unprintable.

Something is *wrong* with TCP/IP in some way??

Not loving broadcasting protocols is not a Troll-like quality.
It is a noble quality. A quality that shows that my wah is untroubled and serene - approaching the perfection even. Lights disturb my serenity when they blink when I DON'T want them to blink.

Interesting reading

[tim1724]

Here are some interesting articles which I've seen today:

Xgrid: High Performance Computing for the Rest of Us Apple's paper Xgrid example: Parallel graphics rendering in POVray Here's an example which slashdotters should appreciate

Wish me luck, folks

[xiaodidi]

I ordered a four-node Xserve cluster. I made the final choice after looking at Xgrid and seeing how easy it is to set up. I will be doing HTD with AutoDock. I don't know of anybody else using the same hardware/software combination...

Re:Not Quite Big Mac

[Lars T.]

most of the ad-hoc networks serviced by XGrid would have something like 100MBs Ethernet

Apple's Pro Machines come with GBit-Ethernet for quite some time now, both PowerMacs and PowerBooks since the second revision of G4s.