Apple did place some emphasis on X-Grid and I was one of the beta testers. Rocket stuff. It has a couple of limits that have since been addressed. One is network speed. Not so great on Gigabit Ethernet, great on Infiniband by throwing thousand dollar bills at the problem. Now we have Thunderbolt so it is out of the box practical now!I think your comment raises another question. Why doesn't Apple invest some serious effort into their XGrid technology?
It seems to me the whole XGrid thing should be handled at the OS level, so software doesn't need to be "XGrid aware" to make use of it. If you own 3 Macs on your LAN with XGrid enabled on them and you start compressing an archive file or converting a video from format to format, the load should automatically get shared among the 3 Macs.
As for apps being able to use it, OSX already made a few huge leaps in that direction to optimize MacPros (and X-serve) with multiple processors, cores and threads. I think we are actually there now. I think this is a deployable technology. Animators, audio engineers, video editing, signal processing can just add as many CPU blocks as needed until either the network is saturated or the problem is solved. If a 2013 Mac-Midi Pro were to have dual processors and 4xTB connectors, they could be linked in a way that 4x4 (16 CPU boxes) could operate at near optimal capacity, and 4x4x4 (64 CPU boxes) system would have a second tier of extra capacity for applications that are more processing intensive (rendering) than I/O intensive (fluid dynamics).
I would like to see the "average" user purchase two Mac-Midi Pros, and an external graphics accelerator box, all TB linked.
I would like to see a DC power input to lower the power usage and facilitate standardized installs.
Rocketman
cites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
http://www.apple.com/science/insidetheimage/thrust_belt/
http://www.apple.com/science/solutions/clustercomputingresources.html
http://www.digikey.com/us/en/techzo...valuating-dc-vs-ac-power-in-data-centers.html
The lowest priced mac with at least 2 TB ports (2x2=4 CPU boxes) is the new low end iMac at $1299.
http://www.apple.com/imac/specs/
The new Mac-Mini only has one. So you could daisy chain 5 of them for a rendering task, but would be useless for fluid dynamics.
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