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

XGrid ala Rendezvous

[OmniVector]

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.

Re:XGrid ala Rendezvous

[Trurl's Machine]

I don't see why RendezVous is actually needed for anything professional

By the very definition, "professional" is when you get paid for doing this. RendezVous eliminates (in some cases) the need to call for support of a paid IT consultant. If you own a small company with a small office network (3 dektops, 2 laptops, one shared printer etc.), you can set up it all using Macs + Airport + Rendezvous printer sharing without shelling out your bucks for a "professional network manager". If you are a scientist, who has Ph.D. in his field - be it biology or chemistry, but not necessarily computer science, you can use XGrid to turn ordinary desktop eMacs into a quite powerful cluster working overnight (while in daytime the same eMac will be used by clueless office workers). And once again, you won't have to pay an IT consultant to set it up for you.

In a sense, what Apple does is even worse than moving jobs to India - they eliminate the need of paying for them.

Re:Impact?

[MacEnvy]

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?

Re:Ain't Apple GREAT!!!

[the argonaut]

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.

Not Quite Big Mac

[ghutchis]

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.

Re:Oh Sweet Jebus! not Rendezvous!

[amsr]

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.

implicit versus explicit configuration

[Onan]

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.