Wired Article....PowerMac Clusters (news to me)
<a href="http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50078-2,00.html" target="_blank">http://www.wired.com/news/mac/0,2125,50078-2,00.html</a>
If you have not seen this, worth the read! A "simple" recompile on existing apps and we could all have PowerMac Clusters that are uhmmmmmmm very fast.
Anyone have any idea why Apple is NOT doing this... Seems like a no brainer, a REAL marketing opportunity for the entire platform and Apple as a company.... for christ sake! WTF!
If you have not seen this, worth the read! A "simple" recompile on existing apps and we could all have PowerMac Clusters that are uhmmmmmmm very fast.
Anyone have any idea why Apple is NOT doing this... Seems like a no brainer, a REAL marketing opportunity for the entire platform and Apple as a company.... for christ sake! WTF!
Comments
Also, the recompile requirement makes sense. "Clustering" is a very specific term: A cluster of machines maintains the illusion that it's one big machine, just as an SMP machine maintains the illusion that it runs on one processor that happens to handle threads really well.
All that's needed, essentially, is a tweak to the OS' messaging API so that it can transparently send messages between instances of applications running on multiple machines (note that the first implementation used AppleScript, which uses Apple Events, which is MacOS' messaging API). Then you recompile the application to link it to the new messaging code (the API doesn't change, only the implementation, so no recoding is necessary), and you're good to go. The trick lies in implementing clustering efficiently.
[ 01-30-2002: Message edited by: Amorph ]</p>