Xserve Clustering

This is cool. It means that people on budgets, like universities, will be able to afford xServe clusters. Maybe we could pitch in, and buy an xServe cluster for MacRumors folding @ home...

Is it now time for XGrid???

Originally posted by Stike
Is it now time for XGrid???

Um... no.

Yeah how bout $10-$50 each person gives for the folding cluster. :D

Good idea but I don't have soo much money to burn.

I'm glad apple is looking for a new market for these Xserve's. :p

Originally posted by Macrumors
...details some of the changes:

Your URL is messed up for that second link.

Originally posted by Stike
Is it now time for XGrid???

Probably. The kernel support is there (mach is frickin' awesome for clusters from what I've read), Rendezvous is there, all that I can see that's really needed is GUI configuration tools and some sort of thing that decides whether or not a task is going to take long enough to be worth sending to another machine (some sort of really fancy load balancer, that can deal with drastically different latencies for different processors). I wouldn't expect it immediately, but I would expect it at some point in the relatively near future.

I think that ideally for the grid you have one full Xserve with many cluster Xserves added on (one would really only need one to have a video card and cd drive).

Originally posted by Catfish_Man
I wouldn't expect it immediately, but I would expect it at some point in the relatively near future.

Whoa, if only I could see the near future! :D
Wait! I have a vision! PPC970-XServes connected via Grid! Whooohooo!

Does this mean that OS X.2 has built-in clustering software or are they relying on someone else to make this work?

I remember looking around on the internet awhile ago and found a clustering program called POOCH (http://www.daugerresearch.com/pooch/whatis.html).

From the Apple website store: (standard)

$2,799.00

Dual 1.33GHz PowerPC G4
2MB L3 cache per processor
256MB DDR333 SDRAM
60GB ATA/133 ADM
Mac OS X Server (10 client)
Gigabit Ethernet

This makes it the same price as the single processor XServe without all of the extra stuff like a video card, CD-ROM, and secondary Gigibit-Ethernet port. Of course, Education and corporate discounts would bring the price even lower.

What isn't clear is wheither or not this has an AGP or not. The datasheet says that it only has two PCI (64bit) while the same datasheet says that the standard XServe has two PCI (64bit) and one PCI/AGP card. Does this mean that it is a different motherboard, or that they just disabled the slot?

Originally posted by nighthawk
What isn't clear is wheither or not this has an AGP or not. The datasheet says that it only has two PCI (64bit) while the same datasheet says that the standard XServe has two PCI (64bit) and one PCI/AGP card. Does this mean that it is a different motherboard, or that they just disabled the slot?

The XServe has a combo AGP/PCI slot along with the 2 PCI 64/66 slots. Depending on if you get the video card option or the 2nd gigabit ethernet card you will either get an AGP/AGP or AGP/PCI riser card that fits that slot. I remember being able to get the riser card seperately in the past, but I may either be completely wrong, it may no longer be available, or (most likely) I don't know where to look. Since it would be more expensive to cripple the system, I doubt that the cluster version has that slot disabled, at most it may have a different back panel that prevents the slot from being used.