MacResearch Introduces OpenMacGrid

Drew McCormack writes "MacResearch.org has just introduced OpenMacGrid. It is a distributed computing grid similar to SETI@home, but unlike other networks, it is built up entirely of Macs utilizing Xgrid, and access is unrestricted. Anyone with Mac OS X 10.4 can donate cycles, and any scientist with a reasonable project can burn cycles."

Comments

Re:Movie studios and CGI

[Max Romantschuk]

Y'know, I imagine stuff like this would be nice to speed up the rendering farms in movie studios. Either make 'm pay for the access or give every contributor with enough cycles a free ticket ;).

This only works in a LAN. Every single frame of a modern movie requires gigabytes of texture data etc. etc... It's not something you can send over the Internet.

Re:Trojans?

[dr.badass]

So, Xgrid-experts, what kind of permissions does an application like this have? Is it sandboxed somehow?

Xgrid jobs run as user 'nobody', which is decently safe, with process limits so it can't forkbomb you to death. A rogue job could fill up /tmp or ~/Public/Drop Box or whatever with garbage until you run out of disk, or some other annoying things. I won't say "nothing major", because that depends on what you've got that's readable or writable by others. I'm also not wearing my expert hat, so it's entirely possible that I'm unaware of some way that Xgrid jobs could 0wnz0r you.

You still need to trust OpenMacGrid to keep these bad jobs off the grid.

Re:Usefulness?

[dr.badass]

How useful can it be to be locked into one OS? How hard is it to make a commandline program and then a Cocoa interface, that way you can get everyone and still have a pretty window and widget for OS X users.

OpenMacGrid uses Xgrid, which is Mac-only. It isn't something new they've made: it's built-in to Mac OS X. You ask "how hard is it...", and the answer is "A lot harder than just using what's already available."

Also, the Xgrid agent doesn't have a pretty window. It's a background daemon.

Re:What constitutes 'reasonable'?

[metalcup]

What I don't get is why this is Mac-only. Are Windows/Linux truely less able to perform these tasks or is it just a Mac promotional campaing under the guise of "research"? Because, X-grid is available only for Macs http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid. html, and all you need to do to set it up (i.e. allow your mac to be a part of the grid) is click on a few options in the system preferences panel - the end user does not need to work with scheduling and other details - the OS takes care of all that with a few options. It really is damn convinient to use for many types of clustering applications. (and I have setup Linux clusters etc). To that end, yeah, it is a bit of a promotional campaign, but only because no other OS can do it out of the box the way Mac can!!