PowerMac Rack Server: Clustering

[rice_web]

Well, isn't this an intriguing idea? In the space that could previosly hold two PowerMacs, now ten will fit. If these racks come with dual processing, clustering could take off as a real possibility.

Imagine, 20 processors at 1GHz all clustered together to do whatever clustering is capable of. Aaaah. It's a nice thought, especially when one considers the space savings.

 

[Catfish_Man]

And clustering on Macs...

...is EASY. Elementary school kids could do it. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find out that Apple did something like auto-clustering with rackmounts.

 

[rice_web]

I like that idea... auto clustering. Imagine if that were built into OS 10.2. The slowest of Macs could potentially be twice the machines they previously were, just as long as another Mac is on the network. With that Rendezvous program that they are incorporating into 10.2, I could see that becoming a possibility.

Ooooh. The thought of my 400Mhz iMac DV going faster just being itself (I've got two iMacs, BTW). Let alone the thought of rack servers automatically working together to crunch numbers at impressive speeds.

 

[rice_web]

Follow up:

I did a search for "Mac Clustering" on Yahoo!, and found a few interesting tidbits. It sounds like Apple will be moving into wireless clustering, that is BUILT-IN to the OS. Sure, this is purely rumor, but what I read sounds fairly credible (if you want informatio yourself, just do the same search and read the articles that come up).

This sounds very promising for Apple. POOCH has achieved 1/5 of a terraflop, and they were only using 100BASE-T and dual 533's. With the new 1GHz PowerMacs and 1000BASE-T, they could possibly achieve 2/5 of a terraflop with the same numbers of computers (76)

However, most homes have only one or two computers. Thus, for families with two PowerMacs, users would finally have the advantage of a killer machine. Even clustering the iMac would prove interesting for many users. I would go and buy a 400MHz G3 on eBay and cluster the two if Apple were to release something like this. Yikes. I'm excited.