Wired Article....PowerMac Clusters (news to me)

dali

<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!

cobra

The droids at Arstechnica would not like that article.

the swan

I'd seen stuff about AppleSeed and stuff before, but never heard the claim that a simple recompile would allow clustering. Probably lots of politics at Apple and at software companies that will decide this one. Very interesting though. Give me an idea for the intensive image processing program I was thinking of writing for my office. :-)

amorph

Historical note: NeXTStep had built-in clustering support. The hooks for both clustering and distributed computing are still there in OS X.



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>