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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!"

30 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 radicalskeptic · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
    2. Re:XGrid ala Rendezvous by Too+Much+Noise · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't see why RendezVous is actually needed for anything professional. Yeah, you could use RendezVous to improvise a transient grid setup. That's kid stuff though, throw together a few macs for finishing a 3dsmax school project overnight, or (as the site cleverly suggests) for local Seti@Home-type projects. Anything serious (real supercomputers, or even anything using MPI, as they just added support for it) would be running the grid 24/7 (or as close as possible), which means fixed IPs and so on, so there's no need for GUI eyecandy in the one-time 'discovering the network' step.

      That out of the way, I would be curious to know how they dealt with the load-balancing stuff - do the nodes report some kind of average availability for the 'loose' screensaver-type setup? since the queue manager would have to somehow take into account non-grid loads on the nodes.

      BTW, the 'Xgrid tachometer' thingy looks like a typical example of useless eyecandy, if the picture is anything like the real thing: a pretty dial that tells you nothing (are those 2GHz available on a free node, on 10 busy ones or somewhere in between? it's not exactly the same thing, you know)

    3. 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.

    4. Re:XGrid ala Rendezvous by Melantha_Bacchae · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Trurl's Machine wrote:

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

      So, how many small companies and scientists were actually using the services of a paid IT consultant before Rendezvous, Airport, or XGrid? Small companies tend to run older systems, and might not bother with a network unless someone inhouse or a relative of the owner knows how to set one up. Scientists have the IT resources of their institution, or they have the brains to rtfm and do it themselves. Apple is just making it easier for these people to access the technology.

      Besides, Rendezvous and XGrid are no good without supporting software. Apple has Blast for XGrid, but that is only one application. The rest of the applications for it have to be written. That creates jobs (or would if the programmers involved could find someone here in the US to hire them to do the work), instead of taking them away.

      If, on the other hand, you have a big company, you are obviously going to need the services of an IT professional (inhouse or consultant). If you want to rage against the loss of IT jobs, why not attack AOL, which is offshoring inhouse jobs? Or IBM and HP's consultant divisions, or any of the smaller fry, that subcontract consultant work to India?

      BTW, Apple has loads of job openings in California. If you are unemployed and in the area, you might want to check them out.

      "What I'm thinking is different from what you are."
      Belabera, "Mothra 3: King Ghidora Attacks" 1998

  2. Impact? by OECD · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Will this negatively impact ("replace") SETI@home, folding@home, etc.? Or will it make it easier for them to add/support Macs?

    --
    One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
    1. Re:Impact? by MacEnvy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --


      ***
  3. Well Done, Apple! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I love Rendezvous, and how easy it makes the set up of home networks/printers/etc..., and I have been using XGrid - just playing around - since Preview 1. I believe that XGrid will make things like VTech's supercomputer accessible to even more schools - perhaps not on as big of a scale hardware-wise, but it will certainly make it easy software-wise.

  4. Socioeconomic Commentary by BandwidthHog · · Score: 3, Interesting
    I found this little blurb on the site (under the tachometer graphic) interesting:

    As more people on the network share their resources, you can solve more problems. Not a bad metaphor for life, either.


    Wonder how long that'll survive the watering-down by the marketroids, relatively benign though they may be at The Mothership.
    --

    Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?
    1. Re:Socioeconomic Commentary by Refrag · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.
  5. Xgrid for folding@home and Photoshop? by Selecter · · Score: 5, Interesting
    The second Xgrid came out, I wanted to know how it could be used for Folding@Home and the RC-5 challenge and so on. Of course Apple has a story up now about Folding@Home and how good the G5 is at it, which is very very good but still not the best. I wrote Vijay Pande and he said they are watching it closely and when it matures they would exploit it for Folding@Home.

    When you can use xgrid and enable any type of grid enabled program that might use Rendevous and some simple plug in of some kind to use however many Macs there are on a given network to crunch away at something is the day Apple will start making serious inroads again. Imagine a Photoshop Mac pool at a Ad agency using Xgrid, or the same thing at the movie making place with Final Cut Pro 5 or whatever.

    I really do like the directions that Apple is going in these days. Stock market does not seem to mind either. :)

  6. Will come in handy in the graphics world by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Informative
    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.

    --
    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
    1. Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world by Quarters · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

    2. Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world by burns210 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world by mcdesign · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world by forkazoo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:Will come in handy in the graphics world by spaceport · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for subtlety. Isaac Asimov
  7. Re:Ain't Apple GREAT!!! by the+argonaut · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  8. Tying into OS X and other new uses. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I think you will see new uses that haven't been thought of. I can't give an example because I haven't thought of them yet. ;-)

    It would also make current tasks even better. For example:

    You would be able to fork a new process transparently to under used machines. The OS would know which machines were under-utilized (the iMac someone's kids use when at home, for example) and if it was maxed out, it would send the process to that other machine. All of it transparent to the user.

    xgrid is great for *applications* usage *now*.

    Apple will incorporate it into the OS itself and it will become even more useful when it makes usage of the CPU cycles (disk transfer perhaps too by sending disk bound processes to another machine) available to anyone on the network who needs them without user interaction.

    Other uses:
    * iMovie and iDVD encoding farmed out to other machines on the network.
    * The Mac equivalent of MythTV (or TiVo or ReplayTV) uses other machines to encode if one is busy.

  9. 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.

    1. Re:Not Quite Big Mac by Lars+T. · · Score: 4, Informative
      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.

      --

      Lars T.

      To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

  10. Re:Oh Sweet Jebus! not Rendezvous! by bob_calder · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

    --
    Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
  11. Interesting reading by tim1724 · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
    --
    -- Tim Buchheim
  12. XXX on X on X on X? by Nova+Express · · Score: 3, Funny
    Say, between this and the next generation X-Box being based on the PowerPC, assuming you could get Mac OS X to run on it, does that mean you could dowload XXX pr0n to display in an X window under OS X using X-Grid on an X-array of XBoxes?

    XXXXXXcellent!

    --
    Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)

    http://www.lawrenceperson.com/

  13. Re:Oh Sweet Jebus! not Rendezvous! by amsr · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  14. Wish me luck, folks by xiaodidi · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...

  15. Re:Oh Sweet Jebus! not Rendezvous! by Lars+T. · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Understanding Zeroconf and Multicast DNS
    Author and Editor's Note: Networking was never supposed to be hard -- but it is. At best it's an annoyance, at worst it's a show stopper. Granny May's got her new printer and after hooking it up, she just can't get it to print across the network, damnit. But an emerging standard, Zeroconf, just might help networking become what we've always wanted it to be: easy.
    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?
    --

    Lars T.

    To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck

  16. Dynamic load balancing by Derek+Mason · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I don't know why Apple haven't released an OS X version of the OpenMosix project, which works wonders on Linux. It moves processes automatically between nodes while they are running, automatically re-routing disk and network access, and copying memory data across. Needs tricky work on the kernel, but combined with Rendezvous technology, it could be a killer. Your heavy tasks would be automatically routed around the workgroup, as and when is appropriate, even if they are only half-way complete.

    1. Re:Dynamic load balancing by danigiri · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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++

  17. implicit versus explicit configuration by Onan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.