Xgrid Clustering Software and Demo 290
no_demons writes "Along with a selection of other goodies, Apple also unveiled their Xgrid clustering technology from their advanced computation group today. Xgrid can turn a number of networked Macs into a supercomputer, detects nodes automagically via Rendezvous, and can run in or out of a screensaver mode. You can download a technology demo (including a BLAST test app) here."
small scale? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:small scale? (Score:4, Informative)
--
d a v e
Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Funny)
Damon,
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
If it works, just think of all the happy legacy owners!
Damon,
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Wait a minute. Your LC 520 is at least 10 times slower than a beige G3 (probably much more, but that would depend on a specific benchmark). I don't know how many of them you have "stacked in your garage", but it looks like this cluster won't even get near the performance of the slowest second-hand G4. So your "many weekends" of hard labor would bring you what - something you can get for $400 on e
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Funny)
Next you suggest to pay for an operating system instead of writing your own?
Tss..
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Re:Oh come on, smile everybody! (Score:2)
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Informative)
No, Xgrid is based off of the Zilla project that ran on NeXT.
Zilla was acquired by Apple when NeXT was purchased.
Zilla was rechristened Xilla during development in honor of OS X.
It's now called XGrid.. and yes it is cool.
Now, XGrid includes support for Rendzvous.
Rendzvous is Apple's release of ZeroConf, an OPEN SOURCE ad hoc IP based protocol.
Someone else asked about running on other BSD's.
XGrid runs in user space. It isn't a kext (kernel extension). It probably could run on other BSDs without too much work, but it is a carbon app so you'd have to totally port the interface to some other GUI API.. and you'd have to port it from Obj C to something more common I'd guess.
Apple hasn't provided source (yet) though so I don't see anyone porting it soon. Maybe reverse engineering it...
other stuff... it apparently makes use of XML too but I haven't gone through all the docs yet.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Funny)
If there is a law of diminishing returns trying to cluster old hardware to keep it useful, I think an LC520 is well past it.
Besides, if you want to do it, see if Linux will run on those 520s and... yes, you guessed it... build a Beowulf cluster out of 'em.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
And hey, if it can, private labs will have a use for all those older G3s lying around. You have to start somewhere.
Damon,
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
see if it can be done
Let me save you some time. It can't.
~jeff
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:3, Interesting)
Pooch was the original easy to use and implement solution for clustering Macs used originally at UCLA for physics modeling.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Won't Work, Use These Alternatives (Score:3, Informative)
Ok, original post shoulda been modded funny or troll, but there are cluster solutions for old Macs, so here goes:
NetBSD/68k [netbsd.org], supports 68k cpus and various free cluster architectures.
Appleseed [ucla.edu], supports OS 8.6 - 9.x on PPC.
Quite a few older PCI Powermacs can be coaxed to run OS X 10.1.x using XPostFacto [macsales.com] and some patience. Won't support XGrid for now, but the other free suspects will work.
Distributed processing on legacy Macs: (Score:3, Informative)
Its not as automagical as XGrid and you will have to write your own multiprocessing code, but it is a way to do distributed processing on old hardware. Clustering a bunch of LC520s may not be the best use of time and electricity, but then who said that a hack must be cost-effective.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Kill practically everything you don't need in the kernel (which is a lot). I've made OS9 work with Performas. Of course I haven't tried yet with the 520, but if RedHat9 runs on a 66DX, why not OSX on an LC with an extra logic card? Yes, it's a helluva stretch. If it works, I'll do a write-up on it. If not, no huge loss, I'm just back at square one.
Damon,
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:5, Informative)
- PCI
- Open Firmware
- a PPC 603 or 604 or later
- oodles of RAM (64 minimum).
Running it on a legacy Mac - that is, anything older than a Power Mac 9500 - would involve somehow getting around these. You'd have to:
- write an Open Firmware bios for the machine and trick it into booting via it
- write drivers for the machine's onboard video so that it LOOKS to the OS like a PCI card behind a bridge chip (repeat for sound, network, etc)
- get a 603 or later (OS X 10.2 needs a G3 or later), some of the upgrades for 68K machines could only go to a 601
- provide for 64 or 128MB RAM on a machine whose motherboard is limited to 36. Oh, and endure the sluggishness of 72-pin RAM.
OS X is not OS 9 and it is not Red Hat.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:4, Informative)
The result was constantly running out of memory. And since pretty much everyone running on a mac requires lots of ram you'd run out of memory fairly quickly, often with no more than two or three applications running.
As for the sluggishness of 72pin RAM, I can only assume your joking, EDO ram was static memory and smoked compared to dynamic memories. Dynamic memory technology was cheaper, has bigger numbers (amusing that the faster it is, the more it needs rewritten and therefore the more it bogs down the processor and the more wait states while it refreshes). Static technology gets expensive when you talk anything much more than 128mb, while dynamic is cheap to 1-2gb.
Between processor bog and additional wait states and the fact these problems scale to the speed of the memory, it's highly debatable whether dynamic is overall superior to static. However saying that static memory is sluggish is insane.
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:4, Interesting)
Damon,
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:2)
Actually, that expansion slot was typically filled with one of two things:
A) an extra logic card which basically just increased the power of the math coprocessor, and
B) an ethernet adaptor.
I have both onhand; the ethernet is actually a 10BaseT and works fairly well; the software was the problem, but after actually getting System7 to run I was online and surfi
Re:Will it work on legacy machines? (Score:3, Funny)
It's a 637CD, actually. I mentioned it because it's based on that 68040 (technically the 68LC040, which lacks the FPU), the same chip used in the LC series which I was originally talking about. Pop in a PPC upgrade (100MHz) and you're up to OS 8.1 (supported) but technically, stip down 9 and it WILL work; grant
Sounds good, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
But for me, the model I want is a broker model. I want to sell my processor time to a broker who will resell it on a day to day basis to whoever is the highest bidder. E-bay of grid computing, ya know. I don't want to pick projects, download clients, etc. I just want to pariticipate (i.e. make money) from whoever is willing to pay the most at any given moment.
And when I feel like it, I'll volunteer x% to non-commericial stuff like SETI@home.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:5, Funny)
And when I feel like it, I'll volunteer x% to non-commericial stuff like SETI@home."
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the 21st century pimp.
"What do we get for 10 teraflops?"
"Anyting you want!"
"Anything?"
"Anyting!"
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:3, Funny)
Me process you too much.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Several companies tried this back in 2001 and discovered that the processor time on your computer is worth less than the overhead cost of using it. Sorry.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Well, sure, it's worth less to companies who are looking to save money in the process or your average 'netizen, who thinks it should be free by divine right). Now if you implemented it with something akin to Mojo [sourceforge.net] so that contributors to the grid could eventually use the grid for their own purposes, that's a different story.
For example, Apple or IBM (who
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem isn't so much that the compute time isn't valuable as that there are relatively few problems that are amenable to this style of distibuted computing.
There are two axis that I believe need to work out: the value of solving the problem (and to whom), and how parallelizable it is.
In ter
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
The corporation is intimately tied to distributed.net [distributed.net] and has been selling distributed / Grid computing to corporations for YEARS.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Why limit this.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Why limit this.. (Score:5, Informative)
(From the FAQ)
Q: Can I use Xgrid with other UNIX-based computers?
A: The short answer is no.
The long answer is that Xgrid uses an XML property list protocol built on top of BEEP for all of its inter-computer communication and coordination, and because these protocols are open, it is possible a client, agent, or controller could be written to run on other UNIX-based computers and interoperate with Xgrid. However, no such programs have been written.
Re:Why limit this.. (Score:2)
Re:Why limit this.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, I wonder.
Re:Why limit this.. (Score:5, Interesting)
This might make sense except that Dell and Sun servers are slower and more expensive than Apple's. Unless you're talking about buying used servers on eBay or something, I suppose. But if you want scientific supercomputing floating point number crunching, the G5 is amazingly good...
Re:Why limit this.. (Score:4, Informative)
Great, this sucks.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Great, this sucks.. (Score:5, Funny)
Anything similar for Linux? (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh..yeah...it's called Mosix (Score:2)
Give it a try.
Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch. (Score:5, Interesting)
We had the second installation of XGrid, the only other group using it at the time was NASA. I haven't had much time to play with it personally but we had our coop do some genetic sequence analysis using it and he was quite impressed. Plus the speedometer-like gauge measuring performance just looks soooo cool.
Re:Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch. (Score:5, Interesting)
The specs of the machine have been outclassed by modern standards, and the neat software features not made irrelevant by Mac OS X have surfaced in Mac OS X Server. But there were two very cool things about the case though that I thought were of the "Geez, that seems so obviously handy!" variety.
The gotcha was that it has never been released. I keep expecting new Mac hardware to one day come out with these two features but until that time I guess I'm still under NDA. Arrggghhhh!!!!!
Be glad your NDA expired with the release of the product. Otherwise you'd be burning with the image of that cool speedometer in your mind and unable to tell anyone about it.
Re:Been there, done that, Apple bought me lunch. (Score:5, Interesting)
mini me super cluster... (Score:2)
Re:mini me super cluster... (Score:4, Interesting)
We did this 6 months ago when we were first beta testing XGrid. I never had the opportunity to personally play with it, but a grid of a hundred EMacs was a pretty good start to a mini-supercomputer I was told.
Re:mini me super cluster... (Score:3, Funny)
emacs created a super-computer? I thought emacs required a supercomputer... or was that xemacs...?
Thank you, I'll be here all week...
db solutions? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm hoping that I could just get a stack of XServes and run an OSS db on it for free (as in no extra effort required), but I'm guessing that's not the way it works.
Re:db solutions? (Score:2)
Re:db solutions? (Score:2)
On the whole, the open-source databases' support for replication/clustering is poor to non-existent.
Re:db solutions? (Score:2)
Nah, not really. (Score:5, Informative)
My TiVo has Rendezvous... (Score:4, Funny)
Virginia Tech Video (Score:2)
If you want to see a behind the scenes vid of the making of the G5 supercluster then go to the link above.
I wonder what, if any, input VT had on XGrid...
Apple vs Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
1. Over all Coolness AND Geek Factors.
2. Usefulness of coolness factor.
3. Ease of use of Geek factor.
Microsoft hasn't done anything remotely like this in thier existance, rarely do they push the tech envelope beyond the what has become ordinary and benign. And when they do, they end up with over analized and engineered products nobody want (Bob?).
Apple of the otherhand is OFTEN making stuff WAY before the curve. Newton/PDA, USB/Firewire, CDROMs, Floppylessness (is that a word), standard networking
If Apple is smart with this, they could play against the new model of "ON DEMAND" services from companies like IBM.
Imagine a corporation that could automatically timeshare, timeshift computing resources based on such technology using the workstations they currently own/purchase. Peak periods of processing could be syphoned from little or unused desktops "On Demand", back filling any need left over from the DP center.
If this is NOT revolutionary it will be at least evolutionary.
Re:Apple vs Microsoft (Score:3, Informative)
http://research.microsoft.com/research/topics/ [microsoft.com]
Its a shame that so little of this work is making its way into products you can use, but them's the breaks.
Re:Apple vs Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft, for all their research, always seem to have a ``me, too'' attitude. Their entire business approach (which is certainly highly successful in many ways) is essentially to jump into every possible market (gaming consoles, consumer electronics, embedded devices, low-end servers, enterprise computing, web application infrastructure, clustering, etc) with the hope of, if not succeeding, at least driving out potential competitors from succeeding instead.
Apple, on the other hand, has seemingly ignored anything but their established market of home users and graphic artists, video editors, and the like for a long, long time. I have never even seen an Xserve in use, neat as they seem to be. They've made no real headway in commercial environments (other than ad agencies and the like), either as workstations or as PCs.
And yet, here we have a product (for which a market may or may not really exist) which falls far outside Apple's traditional domain, but which seems to be clearly innovative. Where Microsoft only seems to promote technologies that it sees other companies already engaged in, Apple pioneers something somewhat more risky. Microsoft's model is probably more successful. But that may not be the point.
Re:Apple vs Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardly a Supercomputer: Cluster computing 101 (Score:5, Informative)
Read ClusterWorld [clusterworld.com] and you can figure this out yourself.
Re:Cluster computing 102? (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine that, an extra supercomputer.
Lockheed and Boeing are excited. Everyone in biotech is going nuts. Everybody's IT department should be thinking: what could we do with a crapload of extra CPU ?
Re:Cluster computing 102? (Score:3, Informative)
90nm G5s (Score:5, Informative)
batch queueing (Score:4, Interesting)
If it is, it is different in nature than the often joked about beowulf clusters and the mosix systems.
I think its great that Apple has one too, the more ideas thrown into the pot, the better all of them become.
-Tim
I thought Sun did something like this already... (Score:2)
Maybe this is what Xgrid is doing now, I didn't read the article too well.
Re:I thought Sun did something like this already.. (Score:2, Informative)
(From the Xcode website [apple.com])
With theRendezvous-enabled distributed build feature it's easy to simply farm out your build by distributing compile workload across idle desktop machines or, better, deploy a dedicated Xserve build farm to do in minutes what would take hours on any single machine.
Re:I thought Sun did something like this already.. (Score:2)
Cheers,
David
Hey Colleges: Computer Labs = SuperComputers (Score:3, Insightful)
any college with a several ~25-machine labs can use this app to do supercomputer stuff, AND get the return on investment from normal users being able to utilize these machines during the day.
Re:Hey Colleges: Computer Labs = SuperComputers (Score:2)
That said, various software packages already exist to do opportunistic supercomputing using the spare resources in machines suitable for use in a lab -- Condor [wisc.edu] is one such package. We have it deployed in our computing labs, and several research groups in our department make use of it.
Cheers,
David
Re:Hey Colleges: Computer Labs = SuperComputers (Score:3, Interesting)
But to do it campus-wide makes many admins very very nervous; the cost of maintainance and upkeep may in fact rise, and even if the secretaries aren't using their P4's with hyperthreading most of the time, the admins don't want the has
ifdef Win32 at Apple? (Score:4, Interesting)
#ifdef _WIN32
#pragma warning( disable : 4127 4706 )
#endif
Why would developers at Apple ifdef for Win32?!
Re:ifdef Win32 at Apple? (Score:2)
Re:ifdef Win32 at Apple? (Score:5, Informative)
AltiVec-based factoring program. Created as extension of original factor.c project at Next Software, Inc.
Not originally PPC specific...
the next step... (Score:2)
and...yadayadayad makes 3 today (Score:2)
Re:and...yadayadayad makes 3 today (Score:2)
He can now be reached at his new villa...wish someone would interview him soon.
I was looking for a way to offload video rendering on my G4, and tried POOCH, but it wasn't immediately compatible with my Linux box so I moved on.
Am I the only one bothered by the GHz meter XGrid uses? Can't wait for the newbies that actually believe they have a 900MHz iMac and Cube combo :)
Imagine (Score:2, Redundant)
Oh! Never mind.
What it's not (Score:3, Interesting)
First impressions (Score:4, Interesting)
It was a little confusing at first to set up, but I eventually got 3 machines total configured as part of my grid - 2x2GHz G5s + 1x867MHz G4. Perhaps if I read the instructions, I would've better understood some of the terminology (agent v. controller v. client, etc.).
The tachometer is sort of flaky. Sometimes it's stuck at zero on one machine while it it is actively moving around on others. Other times it's stuck at some non-zero position. Opening up 2 tachs on the same machine (XGridBlast has its own tach) will show different speeds. Though I should have in theory 8.867 GHz total speed, I could never get it to go over the default 8 "red line"- I was curious if it would rescale once it exceeded 8.
The XGrid client (where you submit jobs) has some default demo type things (I've mostly been testing the Mandelbrot one as it runs in a continuous loop), but it also has a way to build "custom plug-ins" which allow you to submit arbitrary jobs. In other words, executables don't have to be modified per se. Of course for any kind of parallel execution, they do, but if you need to to run 1000 iterations of the same command with slightly different arguments, then it should be able to distribute that "run" pretty well. The GUI for building up such a run is pretty easy to use.
One potentially big issue I've noticed is that once you submit a job, you have to keep the XGrid app open until it is done. For a run that may take days or weeks, I think this could be a problem. I'd like for you to be able to submit the job, quit, and log out (or shutdown the client even) then come back later to check your results.
Also, there doesn't seem to be a queue manager where you can see a list of jobs and their states.
I think that for any file-dependent commands, you need local copies of the files on each Agent node. At least that's how it appeared from perusing the documents for XGrid Blast - each node needs a copy of the database.
FWIW, we're using SGE successfully on a bunch of RedHat based servers, but though OSX maybe *nix, the installation and config was turning to be a pain.
Anyway, those are my initial impressions. I'm sure some of these things will change in the "release" version. In the meantime, I'll have to get working on getting some real work stuff to try out (I work in a university bio department).
-h3
The "factor" demo failed for me (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm potentially seeing a situation where some well meaning non-compatible agent joins an open XGrid and flubs someone's whole job. There needs to be a way to
Re:super computing (Score:3, Funny)
1100 = supercomputer
See, with that many more computers you DO run out of space
*rim shot*
Thanks folks, we're here all week. Try the veal; it's delicious. And please, don't forget to tip your waitress.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:super computing (Score:2)
No, it was not [beowulf.org]; although Japan wasn't exactly the culprit.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:super computing (Score:4, Interesting)
Not exactly, it was also their usage in brute-force decryption. The former point was indeed emphasized in the days of the old Cray supercomputer, but the latter was stressed as the most important factor in mid 1990's, when the aging cold war COCOM was replaced by the Wassenaar Agreement.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:what ever happened to the exageration of the "i (Score:2, Funny)
Duh.
Re:what ever happened to the exageration of the "i (Score:5, Funny)
To be frank I've always wondered about Apple's name syntaxes. When the Mac IIx and the SE/30 came out - improvements of the Mac II and the SE with then top-of-the-line 68030 processors - it seems they really should have gone with Mac II/30 or SEx. Mac II/30 sounds like a third grade joke about chinese dentists but the Macintosh SEx would have probably made them billions.
Re:what ever happened to the exageration of the "i (Score:3, Funny)
They couldn't have called it iGrid.. there is no I in team.
DVD::Rip runs in a clustered mode (Score:2)
Re:DVD::Rip runs in a clustered mode (Score:2)
That page made me appreciate rendezvous infinitely more.
Re:For some reason... (Score:2, Funny)
(maybe put it down on the floor and tap it with your foot)
What about latency?
Re:Competitive with Linux clustering? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, yes they are.
Re:Competitive with Linux clustering? (Score:2, Interesting)
It's pretty well accepted that Apple charges a premium for their products. They're well designed, so sometimes it's worth it, but it seems hard to justify it for something like a server farm where design doesn't matter much.
Re:Competitive with Linux clustering? (Score:5, Informative)
Remember you have to have:
Gigabit Ethernet (the XServe has 2 ports built in).. I think this will probably account for $300-$500 of that thousand right there
SATA
Very high performance memory systems (with ECC on the XServe)
FireWire800 (drives and networking)
PCI-X (can you say Infiniband?)
And if we are focusing on the XServe:
Hardware fault notification (very well implemented)
1U rack space (slide out drawer, including cable management)
MacOS X Server (so nice to admin)
I don't think you know what you are talking about. After all, Virginia Tech just hit #3 on the supercomputing list with a cluster of G5's, and everyone is talking about how cheap they did it. The guy behind the project did a lot of research and discovered that this was the best price, Dell didn't even come close (they gave them 3 tries to do so).
Re:Competitive with Linux clustering? (Score:3, Insightful)
Last time I looked, the absolute bargain basement price on a dual Itanium server was around $20-30K. Which makes that $3k look pretty tasty, actually.
What's the cost? (Score:2)
Service?
Support?
Design?
Usability?
Pe r formance?
Functionality?
Real estate?
Cooling?
Electricity?
VIrginia Tech found Macs were cheaper than the competition, and that's with hulking huge G5 PowerMacs. Imagine the same cluster, but with G5 XServes:
1/4 the size
1/4 the real estate costs
better servicability
better management tools
greater diversity of possible nodes (XServe RAIDs, XServe Compute Node, and XServe)
Same price
So for the same reason that the G5 cluster was cheaper tha
Re:So what happens... (Score:4, Funny)
Try the veal.
Re:Sigh (Score:2)
Re:Sigh (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that Virginia Tech would disagree with you on that last point there. There are not many applications that you could or would want to use 64-bit computing anyway so I don't understand your point. These days it's either DBs or number crunching. For the latter, having distributed system helps it even more.
But if you're not happy with your G5, you could send it to me. I'm sure I could use it to play Pong or something.