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

Missing the point

[Anthonares]

The comments so far have (mostly) overlooked the main point of just why the OpenMacGrid is different: it's *open*. That means that scientists, even PhD students like myself that want to run jobs using far greater numbers of nodes than the clusters (beowolf or otherwise) at our home institutions will now have a means to do so. Most such projects have neither the resources nor the capabilities to create their own custom cross-platform clients like those mentioned from other distributed computing projects.

OpenMacGrid (or just OMG, I guess) uses XGrid, which is built-in to every OSX 10.4 distribution and acts just like any other job queue manager, except it's even easier. So, the whole process of writing a distributed computing project becomes far simpler as well.

Finally, the OMG it doesn't matter if the OMG is cross-platform running on proprietary hardware: so is every other cluster that I as a scientist have ever had access to. The SGI cluster is proprietary, and to an extent so is the Linux machine at our High-Performance Computing lab on campus. And, if you're thinking about it being non-cross-platform from the client side, well, you're probably not thinking differently anyway, so just go download Folding@Home.