There have been Fibre Channel cards and drivers for Macs for years now. Network bandwidth is not a recent requirement for a platform that's used to sling Photoshop files around. So it would not surprise me to hear that there are drivers for an InfiniBand card as well.
That's great for a supercomputer, but not everyone needs or can afford a supercomputer. The great thing about the technologies I mentioned is that they're just about everywhere (on Macs at least) and they perform well enough for small, simple clusters and distributed-computing networks made up of whatever happens to be lying around. The setup doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to be useful - in fact, the whole genius of it is that it would require $0 investment to harness a whole bunch of computational power that would other wise just be depreciating.
Apple could even have school projects using carts full of iBooks for rendering. No, of course it's not as good as a dedicated render farm. But you already have them, and they're just sitting there doing nothing.
There's sooo many uses for this, I can't see how Apple would let it slide ... one of the big advantages is that, with Apple computers, the hardware configuration is a fairly well known quantity (well, certaily compared to PC's) ... so getting various machines to work nicely with each other is much easier.
What was that Steve Jobs said about "Our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength"? This would be a perfect example if Apple went ga-ga with easy-bake clustering.
Think:
Final Cut Pro (rendering)
BLAST/Bioinformatics (sequence matching, etc)
Xcode (oh, sorry, we're almost already there aren't we?)
OK, so you get the idea ... often, you may have a machine, that has to be on it's own (we're going to have to dedicate a few G5's just for video loading in) ... that otherwise, most of the time, just sit there. It's a total waste, but you can't NOT have those machines dedicated to their task, otherwise, an entire business process might get bottlenecked , forcing teams of people to wait for some guy to finish rendering his video transitions on the machine.
Enter clustering,and the cycles on those machines can be used remotely when they're available (which is most of the time) ... and no bottle-necking occurs when they really do have to be used for the important business process the team depends on.
This greatly increases the value and power of the entire platform, and forces managers to think even more about getting Mac's, since the more there are lying around, the more spare cycles that can be nabbed by anybody who needs 'em.
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Originally posted by Amorph
There have been Fibre Channel cards and drivers for Macs for years now. Network bandwidth is not a recent requirement for a platform that's used to sling Photoshop files around. So it would not surprise me to hear that there are drivers for an InfiniBand card as well.
That's great for a supercomputer, but not everyone needs or can afford a supercomputer. The great thing about the technologies I mentioned is that they're just about everywhere (on Macs at least) and they perform well enough for small, simple clusters and distributed-computing networks made up of whatever happens to be lying around. The setup doesn't have to be optimal, it just has to be useful - in fact, the whole genius of it is that it would require $0 investment to harness a whole bunch of computational power that would other wise just be depreciating.
Apple could even have school projects using carts full of iBooks for rendering. No, of course it's not as good as a dedicated render farm. But you already have them, and they're just sitting there doing nothing.
There's sooo many uses for this, I can't see how Apple would let it slide ... one of the big advantages is that, with Apple computers, the hardware configuration is a fairly well known quantity (well, certaily compared to PC's) ... so getting various machines to work nicely with each other is much easier.
What was that Steve Jobs said about "Our greatest weakness is also our greatest strength"? This would be a perfect example if Apple went ga-ga with easy-bake clustering.
Think:
Final Cut Pro (rendering)
BLAST/Bioinformatics (sequence matching, etc)
Xcode (oh, sorry, we're almost already there aren't we?)
OK, so you get the idea ... often, you may have a machine, that has to be on it's own (we're going to have to dedicate a few G5's just for video loading in) ... that otherwise, most of the time, just sit there. It's a total waste, but you can't NOT have those machines dedicated to their task, otherwise, an entire business process might get bottlenecked , forcing teams of people to wait for some guy to finish rendering his video transitions on the machine.
Enter clustering,and the cycles on those machines can be used remotely when they're available (which is most of the time) ... and no bottle-necking occurs when they really do have to be used for the important business process the team depends on.
This greatly increases the value and power of the entire platform, and forces managers to think even more about getting Mac's, since the more there are lying around, the more spare cycles that can be nabbed by anybody who needs 'em.
Man, what a hook!