Xgrid Agent for Unix 219
mac-diddy writes "Someone on Apple's mailing list for Xgrid, Apple's clustering software, just announced an 'Xgrid agent for Linux and other Unix platforms' available for download. There are still some issues being worked on like large file support, but it does allow you to simply add a Unix node to your existing Xgrid cluster. Just goes to show that when companies embrace open standards and code, the world doesn't fall apart."
My Experience (Score:5, Interesting)
Time to find the download.
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How many clusters (Score:5, Interesting)
Plenty of power to be had.... (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.rtp.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=in_the_ne
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I've been dying to know.... (Score:5, Interesting)
If I use XGrid on the two, what kind of performace could I use it for day to day?
Faster compiles of applications would be the first thought. Any usefulness, say running photoshop? How about Quake? MAME?
Home cluster (Score:4, Interesting)
GridEngine (Score:2, Interesting)
http://gridengine.sunsource.net
Probably a silly question but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:GridEngine (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:So could someone please inform me (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead of buying a product that is 95% of what I want I can take a OSS package that is 90% of the way there and pay a developer to customise it to exactly my needs. Now I have a solution that is perfect for my business, maybe given something back to the OSS community. While if I had bought the product I would probably have to change my business to use the product. The company now is also free of licensing and upgrade issues. Also they do not have to worry about the vendor going out of business or introducing a new version with no support for the old version.
If you think of software as tools for business rather than something that a developer trys to sell OSS makes a lot more sense.
Re:Mixed Company (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for home use too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering Apple's ease-of-use for heavyweight *NIX apps this would empower more people to have more computing resources available rather than the big fish out there - schools with low budgets would be able to stretch their capabilities that bit further. And so on.
Re:Why bother? (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want something free, TORQUE is OK. It is a OpenPBS derivative (they started with the last OpenPBS version and added all the popular scalability and fault tolerance patches). TORQUE is actively developed under some DOE contracts, and even the company that has the DOE contracts to develop and support TORQUE will give other people some free support (I've had them on the phone helping to debug some of the code). You can get TORQUE from Supercluster.org.
PBS Pro is very good, but costs a lot unless you are a degree granting department (then it is free).
Re:Why another technology (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good for home use too. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I've been dying to know.... (Score:2, Interesting)
While the Xgrid application does indeed allow you to create custom interfaces for command line programs, there is still the issue of data. Xgrid will start processes on remote machines but as to how data is read and distributed is another matter.
i.e. If you have an application that simply generates data(eg. a calendar) then that would work well with the custom plug-in feature. However, if your program needs to be fed data(eg. sort a list read from stdin), your program would have to have a way of splitting the data and giving it to the appropriate process. To achieve this, you would really have to use the Xgrid API to write your own plug-in.
Re:Good for home use too. (Score:3, Interesting)
The first step would be getting the data off of the DVD. Clearly that wouldn't be parallelizable unless you had multiple copies of the DVD (or some sort of hideous DVD multicast SAN).
The second step (decryption) would probably be parallelizable. I don't know much about how CSS works but I imagine that it would be a fairly easy task to split the ciphertext into blocks for distribution and decryption.
The third step (recompression) could be split up for parallelization by scene.
The fourth step would be serial - reassembling the compressed movie into a single file, or maybe a few files if a maximum size (say, 700MB) for each single file were desired.
Ideally, the second and third steps could be combined. Empirically it's clear that it's possible to jump to a scene without decrypting the entire title up to that point, so it should be possible to split the encrypted scene data out, pass it to a node, and get back that same scene in recompressed form.
Splitting things up this way would probably also overcome the problem the parent post describes (that of not wanting every frame to be a key frame). Starting each scene as a key frame would add trivial overhead at worst; at best this is what a serial encoding process would do anyway since the frame content probably changes drastically with each scene change anyway.
Re:I've been dying to know.... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I've been dying to know.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Xgrid isn't meant to solve all computational problems. It is designed to solve the ones involving long independent or at worst loosely coupled problems.