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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."
well does it?
By now everyone should have heard about OpenMacGrid and its nutty, misinformed ruses. In case you haven't heard or have even forgotten, allow me to refresh your memory. What follows is a series of remarks addressed to the readers of this letter and to OpenMacGrid itself. OpenMacGrid sometimes uses the word "ultracentrifugation" when describing its catch-phrases. Beware! This is a buzzword designed for emotional response.
OpenMacGrid uses the very intellectual tools it criticizes, namely consequentialist arguments rather than arguments about truth or falsity. OpenMacGrid's fantasy is to mold your mind and have you see the world not as it is, but as it wants you to see it. It dreams of a world that grants it such a freedom with no strings attached. Welcome to the world of fogyism! In that nightmare world it has long since been forgotten that some organizations are responsible and others are not. OpenMacGrid falls into the category of "not".
The greatest quote I ever heard goes something like this: "Like most organizations that have an insufferable agenda to advocate, OpenMacGrid wants to produce a new generation of fork-tongued cockalorums whose opinions and prejudices, far from being enlightened and challenged, are simply legitimized." I am a law-and-order kind of person. I hate to see crimes go unpunished. That's why I indisputably hope that OpenMacGrid serves a long prison term for its illegal attempts to infiltrate and then dominate and control the mass media. Here's the heart of the matter: The question that's on everyone's mind these days is, "Why, in the name of all that is good and holy, does OpenMacGrid want to damn this nation and this world to Hell?" In classic sophist fashion, I ask another question in reply: Where do we go from here? People often ask me that question. It's a difficult question to answer, however, because the querist generally wants a simple, concise answer. He doesn't want to hear a long, drawn-out explanation about how OpenMacGrid is an interesting organization. On the one hand, it likes to silence any criticism of the brainwashing and double standards that it has increasingly been practicing. But on the other hand, it, already oppressive with its self-centered deeds, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species -- if separate species we be -- for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loosed upon the world. If you think that that's a frightening thought, then consider that in order to champion the force of goodness against the greed of self-pitying hedonists, we must break the spell of great expectations that now binds the worst types of effete flimflammers there are to OpenMacGrid. And that's just the first step. Remember, it has nothing but contempt for you, and you don't even know it. That's why I feel obligated to inform you that it likes dissertations that promote racial superiority doctrines, ethnic persecution, imperialist expansion, and genocide. Could there be a conflict of interest there? If you were to ask me, I'd say that I have a plan to place blame where it belongs -- in the hands of OpenMacGrid and its disgraceful, litigious subordinates. I call this plan "Operation put to rest illaudable and self-satisfied epithets such as OpenMacGrid's". (Granted, I need a shorter, catchier name, but that one will do for now.) My plan's underlying motif is that if OpenMacGrid can't stand the heat, it should get out of the kitchen. Let me carry my thoughts on this subject a bit further. OpenMacGrid's egocentric attempt to construct a creative response to my previous letter was absolutely pitiful. Really, OpenMacGrid, stringing together a bunch of solecistic insults and seemingly random babble is hardly effective. It simply proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that caustic hypochondriacs like it are all alike. To top that off, what I wrote just a moment ago is not the paranoid rambling of a laughable wacko. It's a fact. You can observe a definite bias in OpenMacGrid's precepts relating to unrestrained monomaniacs. Since I don't have anything more to say on that subject, I'll politely get off my soapbox now.
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 ;).
How about we call each node in the OpenMacGrid a MacGriddle?
Who'll the judge? The community?
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Good for him! But I still won't eat there.
http://www.macresearch.org/contribute_to_openmacg
So, Xgrid-experts, what kind of permissions does an application like this have? Is it sandboxed somehow?
.: Max Romantschuk
I do hope their website isn't representative of their grid's performance...
Imagine a beowulf cluster of... a cluster?
You never realize how much manually made unmanaged "linked" lists suck, till you have src.link.link.link.link...
with a beowulf cluster of these... they might even handle the rush from slashdot.
I went ahead and signed up (what can I say, I'm a sucker for science) but I'm really hoping they make it clear what will be running on the agents.
:-P
One thing quite curious, the "introduction" images are almost direct yanks from xgrid@stanfard including the Dashboard widget the push as their own from the xgrid widget SDK linked with the xgrid@stanford project as well.
Should be interesting how this shapes up. 91 total agents right now, 0 working
Error 407 - No creative sig found
Hot grids down your pants!
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
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.
I just configured my ibook following the simple instructions here.
/. effect is beneficial to those involved!
Dead simple. The process is still running at 0.0% so i guess i haven't been assigned anything yet.
First time that
Re-enactment of the creation of the OpenMacGrid...
Person 1: "Hey, I've got an idea!"
Person 2: "Yeah?"
Person 1: "Yeah! Let's make a compute grid... except, it won't be like those other compute grids. Except, it kinda will. But it won't. But that's not the point. People will be able to submit their own projects!"
Person 2: "Oh, you mean like BOINC, GPU, The World Community Grid, distributed.net, Leiden, Grid.org, OurGrid..."
Person 1: "Well, uh... yeah... I guess... except, um... let's run it on a Mac!"
Person 2: "Hey, yeah, that's a totally original and cool plan, as opposed to actually devoting processor time to worthwhile and established projects like Folding@Home and SETI!"
Thought: Maybe, instead of everybody making their own little grid system... we could all make things go ALOT faster by devoting our processors to more than simulating chess games (Yes, I'm talking to you, Chess960) and focus it where it really counts, like finding a cure to debilitating diseases or searching for intelligent life. (Not a whole lot of it on Earth.)
I'm glad someone finally found a way to harness the energy of 10000 mac fan boys. (You too Whiney)
(Monty that is), inspired by your last line, of course...n g.html
http://www.gecdsb.on.ca/d&g/astro/music/Galaxy_So
"...and access is unrestricted."
Well, kind of. Except for the fact that you need a proprietary OS to access it. And proprietary hardware to go with it. It seems if you do not have the correct hardware and try to run this, Apple will sue the shit out of you. Why don't they make this compatable with all versions of FreeBSD, then call it unrestricted?
For example, I just put up this Java Web Start http://master.gallery.hd.org/_AI/remote.jsp project to enable people to help along my little AI project. It is entirely in the sandbox, and is careful with bandwidth and memory and CPU usage. But you don't have to trust me, you only have to trust Sun.
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
3/5!
Good use of pakin.org.
After all, I am strangely colored.
I don't think scientists who require computational power work on macs. Why would they require macs when there are beowulf clusters around?
From my general vegan perspective: could instead call each node an apple. Get it? apples on tree branch grid. Dynamic with key word Macgrid.
Not to mention I'm sure they'd be thrilled to have basically the entire movie contents floating around the Internet on random people's computers.
#include ".signature"
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.
*most people never really think about the consequences*
seems they are running there website on the grid
sql error too many connections
Instead of blindly contributing my cycles to whatever project some group of people in california (or wherever) decide is the project of the day, I would like it if I was given the option as a node to pick which project(s) my cycles were used for. People feel better about helping others and contributing/donating when they have a better knowledge of what exactly they are helping. I would be more likely to donate my cycles if I was able to pick which project I was most interested in loaning my hardware to.
It would also be to their benefit to introduce some competition. Contests like RC64 encouraged teamwork, and there were daily ranking boards where you could go see whose teams were knocking out the most units that day. There is no better motivator to encourage donation of resources than competition and bragging rights. Many of those teams were group oriented, there were things like TeamUnix, TeamMacinotosh, TeamUCLA, etc, and again that gives the nodes in each team a feeling of belonging to a group of people they can relate to, even if they have little in common.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
With all the stories I've heard of the cooling fans on the MacBook's going wonky if run at too high of a speed for too long, I'm reluctant to offer my spare cycles to Xgrid.
The last thing I want to happen as a result of being a participant is seeing my fan spooled up to 6000+ RPM day in and day out while my Mac crunches numbers, only to result in the fan itself crapping out a few months later.
"nobody" user can still listen for and establish connections over network, so an OpenMacGrid node can participate in DDoS attack and spam delivery.
Grid computing is essentially botnet, trying to use that concept for good scientific purpose.
I once had a signature.
It is more like expecting McDonald's saying they will give 50c from each purchase to a fund to end the world hunger, but ONLY if you order your BigMacs wearing at least 1500$ worth of Armani clothing and apparel.
And an iPod.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
You'll have to stave off George Foreman, or he'll try to put his name on it.
Big Pharm, for example, could sneak in research that is truly useful, but then gets pumped into its proprietary medicinal development? That takes it out of the realm of Open Source research, doesn't it?
Bark less. Wag more.
If this is not an exclusive Mac-only technology then I am not interested. Why would I want to share my computing cycles with users of inferior platforms?
How many patents this project will generate per year? I am happy to help these smart guys to make money.
" ... and any scientist with a reasonable project can burn cycles."
Define "reasonable".
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
After being hit by slashdot the site appears to be up and running fine now.
Signed up, and checked in tonight. What the hell is it running?
/var/xgrid/agent/tasks/4nOFfwTN/executables/boinc -no_gui_rpc -attach_project http://setiathome/
nobody 5606 100.0 -3.4 103580 70916 ?? RN 8:00PM 130:53.62 setiathome_5.13_powerpc-apple-darwin
nobody 5598 0.0 -0.3 28208 5508 ?? SNs 7:57PM 0:02.37
For a serious grid, sure I'd donate. But for what sure seems like an attempt to inflate some jack-off's seti at home score? Don't think so.