clustering MacMinis - worth it?

zozo
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
if one were to cluster a few MacMinis together, would there be any way to harness that processing power for, say, Photoshop? Or would it be useless for processing needs?



Would I need specialized software? X-Server? Applications would have to be aware of the clustering?



Thanks

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    ipodandimacipodandimac Posts: 3,273member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by ZO

    if one were to cluster a few MacMinis together, would there be any way to harness that processing power for, say, Photoshop? Or would it be useless for processing needs?



    Would I need specialized software? X-Server? Applications would have to be aware of the clustering?



    Thanks



    you would be way better off just getting a power mac. assuming you dont get the crappy base model of the mini to do he clustering, you're gonna be spending over $2000 anyways, not to mention os x server if you buy it.
  • Reply 2 of 7
    zozo Posts: 3,117member
    i totally agree with you, but would there be any benefit (or even the possibility) of getting for horse power from clustering Mac Minis together?



    Im thinking of things like the new X-Code that will borrow processing power in the background from other computers on the network in order to compile, etc.



    I'm thinking of something like that for really really large photoshop files, 3D rendering, and generally intense processing demands.



    Yes of course you normally have a budget for possibly getting this extra horsepower from Xserves or something, but if one day you really dont need all that power, you cant exactly just use one as a desktop, while with a Mini, you just detach and add a monitor and you have a wonderful desktop.



    etc etc etc
  • Reply 3 of 7
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    X Grid should work alright, but you will be prevented from doing anything really grand until someone makes an infiniband card that plugs into the airport extreme slot.



    Anyway, for 5 Grand you can have 10 minis or one Xserve. A powermac will cost 3 grand. If you're crunching data that isn't too memory intense but needs lots of CPU, the mini cluster will be the fastest by a long shot. I would guess that the Dual G5 2.5 has about 3 to 4x the processing power of the G4 in the mini.



    An example here is raytracing. A cluster of minis would be wonderful to render on with Electric Image, which not only has very clever (and good) altivec usage, but also has a network-render feature built in.



    Photoshop is more memory intensive than anything else, aside from video editing, and thus isn't really a good candidate for mini clustering.
  • Reply 4 of 7
    tednditedndi Posts: 1,921member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by Splinemodel

    X Grid should work alright, but you will be prevented from doing anything really grand until someone makes an infiniband card that plugs into the airport extreme slot.









    Wow what a marketing idea:



    6 pack of minis with infiniband $2800 and xgrid bundle.
  • Reply 5 of 7
    splinemodelsplinemodel Posts: 7,311member
    Quote:

    Originally posted by TednDi

    Wow what a marketing idea:



    6 pack of minis with infiniband $2800 and xgrid bundle.



    It would be a tremendous hack, but I guarantee that it's possible. I'm not sure, though, how much throughput is allowed to the airport extreme slot.
  • Reply 6 of 7
    wmfwmf Posts: 1,164member
    Wow, I love these crazy threads.



    XGrid does not speed up normal apps like Photoshop.



    Even if it did, minis have poor price/performance compared to Xserves.



    The AirPort Extreme slot is 133MB/s PCI, which isn't even remotely fast enough to drive a 1+1GB/s Infiniband link.
  • Reply 7 of 7
    mcqmcq Posts: 1,543member
    Already discussed. Please see this thread:

    http://forums.appleinsider.com/showt...hlight=cluster
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