Grid Meter » Keeping an eye on Apple's Grid computing efforts ...

November 08, 2005 | Comments: (0)

Keeping an eye on Apple's Grid computing efforts ...

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Yesterday I spoke about the Windows / Linux dichotomy and how it relates to Grid. However, there is another OS player that really can't be discounted: Mac OS X.

Sure, one could argue that OS X is simply BSD Unix all dressed up, but in this case the clothes may indeed make the man. Here are some reasons that OS X needs to remain on the Grid radar.

Xgrid

Admittedly I don't know a whole lot about Xgrid because I don't know of any enterprise scale deployments where it is in use. However, it ships standard with the latest version of OS X which means it has the blessing of the "powers that be" at Apple, which is no small feat. It has a very user friendly graphical configuration widget that makes deploying such a Grid a snap. There are some community cycle sharing implementations deployed, and I'm sure there are some local Grids out there where it is in use (if you know of any, please drop me a note).

Commercial Grid Software

The GridIron XLR8 application manager runtime has supported Mac OS X for some time now. There are also several commercial schedulers and resource managers including Sun Grid Engine and Platform LSF which also run on OS X.

Open Source Software

Given the Unix base of OS X, Apple has made Open Source development part of its development strategy. Applications and build tools that are utilized by open source Grid middleware such as MySQL, ant, and the gnu development tools run on OS X. The Globus Toolkit builds easily under OS X with the binaries soon to follow.

OSx86

Lastly, and this may indeed be the most significant, is that OS X for the x86 architecture is currently under serious development in both Apple sanctioned and community development forms. When ready for prime time, OS X may indeed displace a non-trivial number of Linux installs. With open source, commercial offerings, and Xgrid ready to go, this could be a whole new audience for Grid.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on November 8, 2005 10:43 AM

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