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Apple Releases Xgrid Technology Preview 2

Posted by pudge on from the super-size-my-computational-ability dept.

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!"

3 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. XGrid ala Rendezvous by OmniVector · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:XGrid ala Rendezvous by Trurl's+Machine · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. Not Quite Big Mac by ghutchis · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.