Apple Xgrid: out-of-the-box supercomputing clustering

Cory Doctorow 6:27 am Thu Jan 8, 2004

A much-overlooked announcement from this week's MacWorld Expo is XGrid, an out-of-the-box, Apple-supported application for clustering MacOS machines together to form supercomputers, using Rendezvous and screen-savers to accomplish networking and scheduling. The announcement page reads like a cross between the COSM, PopoularPower and SETI@Home manifestoes.

Without needing any programming knowledge, you can see the power of sharing resources when you set a group of Macs to drawing sophisticated graphics. As you add more Macs to the cluster, the program draws more quickly, as in the included Mandelbrot set demo. If you're a geneticist, you'll appreciate the Xgrid BLAST application that lets you compare sets of genetic sequences even more quickly…

Xgrid uses zero configuration Rendezvous to discover available resources, so you never have to enter IP addresses to set up a cluster. An easy-to-use System Preference panel lets you control how your machine gets used by the network, and also tells the cluster which computer can send problems to the group for number crunching. Xgrid takes the grunt work out of splitting jobs and collecting results. Many scientists who already use command line tools in their work will immediately be able to take advantage of Xgrid and have the power of a cluster without the hassle of setup.

(via Kottke)

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