Apple Previews Xgrid Technology

Apple today previewed Xgrid,a computational clustering technology from Apple’s Advanced ComputationGroup (ACG). Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensiveenvironments to fully utilise all IT resources, including desktops andservers, by creating a grid enabled “virtual” IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing. Available as a free beta download today from http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ve/acgresearch.html, Xgrid bringsApple’s legendary ease-of-use to computational clustering by providing theeasiest way to run compute intensive applications, such as the populargene-sequencing application BLAST, on multiple Macs using Apple’s Rendezvous networking technology.

“Xgrid makes it easy to turn your Mac cluster into a supercomputer”, said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide ProductMarketing. “The new Xgrid software agents use Apple’s breakthroughRendezvous networking technology to automatically discover, connect andmanage tasks across available systems in a Mac cluster”.

With Xgrid running on Xserve G5 servers (also announced today) in a 42Uindustry-standard rack, up to 84 PowerPC G5 processors can be clustered tocreate a supercomputer with 1.5 teraflops of processing power dedicated tosolving compute-intensive problems. Management is simple with Xgrid. TheXgrid Console has an intuitive Aqua interface that makes it easy to executeUNIX commands, run shell scripts or feed applications across a cluster.Xgrid ships with built-in support for the popular gene-sequencingapplication BLAST and comes with a software developer kit that makes portingcustom compute intensive applications to Xgrid easy.

Customers from NASA, Genentech, Simon Fraser University, Reed College andVirginia Tech have been testing the new technology on clusters of Macdesktops, portables and servers.

Mathematical researchers led by Dr. Peter Borwein at Simon Fraser Universityin Burnaby, British Columbia, have used Xgrid in their exploration of thedifficult problem of finding low autocorrelation binary sequences. With thehelp of Xgrid, the group has harnessed the computing power of machines instudent labs at the university to create a system capable of processing dataat more than 30GHz.

“The Xgrid BLAST application enables bioinformatics researchers to performdistributed BLAST searches on a cluster running the Xgrid software”, saidRichard H. Scheller, Ph.D., senior vice president of Research, Genentech.“We tested Xgrid BLAST by querying DNA sequence files for matches againstmulti-gigabyte genomic databases on a cluster of four dual-processorXserves”.

Xgrid was tested at NASA Langley Research Centre in Hampton, Virginia. TheFORTRAN-based jet noise prediction code “Jet3D” was run across a distributedcluster of Power Mac G5, Power Mac G4 and Xserve G4 systems. A total ofeight G4 and two G5 processors were run, resulting in performance ofapproximately 32 gigaflops.

 

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