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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!"
I hope apple does to grid computing what they did to local subnet computing. Rendezvous is an awesome technology for finding people nearby, or doing any simple/quick home networking.
- tristan
Most likely, the other distributed computing entities will analyze XGrid and make their products better by incorporating new Apple technologies. Just like every other industry has done when Apple comes out with something new.
Truthfully, the applications are different. SETI and the like are analyzing predetermined/presegmented bits of data, while XGrid is targeted as more of a local (intranet), real-time distributed computing application. Agree/disagree?
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I highly doubt that is there goal. I doubt there are that many consumer applications for it.
However, I can see it as being very useful for educational institutions (both higher ed. and K-12 in the U.S., as well as their international equivalents) as well as small media and software developers, the sorts who could make some usage of distributed apps but not have the funding for a full-time sysadmin to run the thing. And of course, that's a selling point for large businesses as well, since lower admin costs = firing IT staff = salary increase for the CEO and higher stock prices for the do-nothing class.
fuck you.
XGrid is an extremely interesting project, but it's not designed to take on a dedicated, custom-designed cluster like VT's Big Mac.
Some calculations can be split into pieces that don't require much "talk" with other pieces. For example, Apple's Mandelbrot demo--you don't need to know what's running on other processors.
OTOH, many problems require quite a bit of cross-talk with other processors. For example, most of the quantum chemistry calculations I run require calculating big integrals. These are run across multi-proc boxes or clusters, but the speedup depends a *lot* on the latency of the network. So XGrid won't really help here--most of the ad-hoc networks serviced by XGrid would have something like 100MBs Ethernet, which is slow.
I'm willing to put up $$ to use supercomputing centers like VT's Big Mac because they're *designed* to handle hard-core parallel number-crunching. Right now, I'm running jobs on a 24-proc POWER3 cluster with 4GB RAM per processor. (Yes, the extra RAM really helps too since I don't hit the hard drive much.)
I think XGrid will see a lot of use for academic or corporate environments to allow adhoc clustering. As an example, I can run some calcs on an XGrid "cluster" at night on all of the desktop Macs in a lab or across an office. These won't be anywhere near as fast as a well-designed cluster. But it will give me access to "untapped" CPU cycles.
That seems to fall in line with Apple's marketing style. They like to infuse social commentary into their prose.
I have a website. It's about Macs.
not just when they go home, when they go to lunch... you can use it as a screensaver as well:). This system is pretty damn cool.
Yes the problem with standard TCP/IP is it isn't bootstrapping enough for a home user to plug two or three computers together and see them all on a network without configuring a lot of stuff. Typical client server tcp/ip apps require you to know the address or name of each server, or at least to run an SLP server.
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.
True many 3D apps do allow you to do this. Cinema4d is one of them and After Effects also lets you "share" computers in this way. But the problem with this way of doing things is that you need to install the software on each of your client machines.
In many working environments this just isn't practical because various users won't let you or their machines don't have enough RAM, diskspace get turned off at night etc etc. In the place I work there are lots of computers but only a handful are capable of running Cinema4D Net (Cinema 4D distribution program) at the level I need it at and those machines often have other tasks to do.
Yeah, I have been wondering the same. However, I am sure the longtime UNIX wizards at Apple (remember some come from NeXT) know of such projects.
My bet is that they have thought long and hard on this and it is not yet implemented because of cost, time-to-market issues and specially the fact that adding this incredibly complex stuff to a fairly new OS (though some of the tech is in fact quite old) would actually hamper its development greatly.
Once they have their shit together (recently) and much needed optimization has already been done they can think of more arcane stuff, starting with something that gives tangible benefits with minimal cost (XGrid). They are sanely going step by step, once this is ironed out they can go forward.
Bear in mind as well that complete process migration needs a common and stable filesystem space (which enterprise Linux setups have) which JoeSixPack installation don't have (mostly they occasionally do the AppleShare stuff to get their son's DiVX files). Having this in mind, I would first implement a JSP-aware disk sharing which could withstand wizardry such as process migration. Afterwards, go the OpenMosix way...
dani++
Now, imagine : It not sucking. I've set up screamernet networks before. Frankly, I wouldn't mind a bit if I could just add a simple batch job to a thingy that does auto-discovery of all the nodes, and then I go get a burger.
Some years ago, I asserted that DHCP basically had no good reason to exist. Any time a machine was going to be on my network, I wanted to know about it and explicitly handle its placement myself, rather than just having things reconfigure themselves willy-nilly.
Predictably, I've now changed my mind about that for many environments. If I were running a network of a thousand workstations, I'd much rather deal with the small chance of one of them doing something inappropriate than configure them all manually.
I have a guess that you may undergo a similar change in thinking about the appropriateness of Rendezvous and/or Xgrid. When it's an unusual task that only gets handled in small and exceptional circumstances, it seems best to handle it explicitly. When it just becomes part of what normal computers do all the time, it seems unthinkable to handle it manually.
BTW, as a network professional you surely know the difference between broadcasting and multicasting? What are your thoughts on DHCP? What does "Job Protection" mean to you?
Are you kidding? I suppose you think everyone should use Windows so you can bill more hours installing security patches too? We all know how networking works, the point is, its much easier for end users if when they browse the network, things just show up. If this was the case, maybe you could spend more of your IT hours actually adding value to the organization you work for rather than typing in URLs for users.