| Wednesday, June 23, 2004 |
18:41 - And it keeps POVRAY alive too
http://www.novajo.ca/simple/archives/000026.html
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J Greely notes a further development in the treatment of Apple by education/research institutions as a true big-iron UNIX vendor. XGrid, Apple's seamless clustering technology for distributed computing, is great if you've bought a bunch of Xserves—but what if you'd rather go the cheap route and use a bunch of Linux boxes for your nodes?
In January 2004, Apple released XGrid, a simple system for setting up and using a cluster of OS X machines. It is very simple to use compared to other grid or cluster systems and reduces the learning curve for performing cluster computation. The appeal of XGrid is that it shields the end user from the details of the cluster. What is missing to make it even more powerful is an agent for architectures other than Mac OS X (the agent in Xgrid terminology is the computer performing the computation). This is important since the computer infrastructure available to scientists is not always based on Mac OS X, and universities have a significant investment in various Unix platforms that should not be neglected when running computations in clusters. This article introduces the first working Xgrid agent for Linux and other Unix systems that can be integrated in any XGrid cluster (managed by OS X). The agent will compile and work on Linux (at least Debian and RedHat), Solaris (minimal testing) and Darwin (tested). You still need an OS X machine for the controller and for using the actual XGrid (with XGrid.app). Also, the user currently needs to "be aware" that the cluster is multi-architecture (since the XGrid controller actually does not know). Examples are provided to show you how to deal with this.
Note the conspicuous absence of any snide geeky condescension toward Apple. This is science seeking the best and most practical solution, and building upon the tools Apple has made available, with the implicit understanding that it's best-of-breed stuff.
And they have examples using POVRAY. Man, those were the days—I remember rendering that chessboard on my first "real" computer, a 386/33. It took something like twenty hours at 1024x768, and I couldn't even view the final product on my 8-bit Trident SVGA card without converting it to a GIF first.
I'd love to know how long it takes a G5 cluster to munch through those beloved old scene files. Too bad I've long since lost them, off to the dumpster with that 386's 80MB hard drive...
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Brian Tiemann
