Distributed Computing with Mac Minis

[MagnumOP]

I was extremely intrigued to hear them mention connecting a bunch of Mac Minis together to increase computing capability. I do scientific computing for work, so this would be awesome. I have played around with distributed workloads using various Python tools. The ones I've used function over the network.

I wonder if Apple is creating it's own distributed computing tools to make this easy to do this for any workload or application...plug and play cluster computing perhaps?

Any thoughts?



Credit: as similar question to this was asked here. But, that thread seemed to have a different point, so I've made a new one.

 

[now i see it]

My guess they were showing an example small mini 3D "render farm" over a network. Nothing new and something Mac minis have been able to do since forever.

 

[MagnumOP]

Yeah, I imagine you are correct. It seems like there is a real opportunity for Apple, who owns the whole ecosystem, to provide such an integrated solution. But I will continue to wish.

 

[gmanist1000]

So, how does this work exactly? You string a bunch of them together over Ethernet / Thunderbolt and they automatically talk to each other? How does adding different configurations affect things? Is it only useful for rendering things? So many questions.

 

[ctyrider]

"Real opportunity" to do what? Support some bespoke clustering solution that 99.999% of their customers could not care less about?

Apple got out of enterprise/server markets a decade ago. I am shocked they even continue to support Mini, and thew us a major bone with the today's announcement.

Yeah, I imagine you are correct. It seems like there is a real opportunity for Apple, who owns the whole ecosystem, to provide such an integrated solution. But I will continue to wish.

 

[rwh202]

Yeah, I imagine you are correct. It seems like there is a real opportunity for Apple, who owns the whole ecosystem, to provide such an integrated solution. But I will continue to wish.

Well they did - xgrid:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid

Just that they discontinued it, like a lot of other useful stuff...

 

[jasnw]

Good old Xgrid - one of the many wheels that fell off as Apple Computers morphed into Apple Content, Inc. Hopefully we'll see some movement back to computers based on yesterday's release of a new Mini.

 

[Dr. Stealth]

If you but a stack of new Mini's for distributed computing be sure to get the 10Gb Ethernet option.