Xgrid Previewed

[yamabushi]

Xgrid game servers would be cool. 😉 Hmm...now I need to design a game that can take advantage of this.😎 Maybe a Counterstrike type of game with 100 players and 1000 bots. 😀

 

[sky131]

Was anyone able to get the screen saver to actually display the data for their cluster. Mine was running at 5GHz, but the screen saver tachometer deal was sitting pretty at 0.

 

[supatekmedia88]

I just installed Xgrid, and realize very soon all rendering apps could be
configured for it. The tachometer screensaver worked perfectly.

Virginia Tech should do Maya and Shake rendering, making the world's
largest renderfarm.

Film directors like myself could go there to do big 3d projects, fight with
the big studios.

I forget how many nodes Pixar is currently running, but I'm sure Virginia Tech
could make some $$$ doing this.

A great idea.



http://www.supatek.com

 

[MasterX (OSiX)]

Yeah you can't use Xgrid for Photoshop or iMovie. People are thinking in terms of low latency requirement high processing, however grids and clusters are designed for low bandwidth per minute computations. They are used for insane math and rendering because you can send (in the case of SETI) about 240K of data to a node, have it crunch for a whopping 10 hours and have it come back. iMovie or FCP would need the network to carry gigabytes per second to say only 5 computers, then receive these files back and expect it all to work well? Not likely. VTech could pull it off with their 20GBps Full Duplex Fiber, but the best home networks are usually 100 Mbps Duplex switched networks, which isn't going to cut it for photoshop (which to be broken up, sent out in 4 or 9 blocks, processed and returned would be way too much overhead for anything but a G5, which already runs Photoshop fast enough). Xgrid isn't a consumer app, it's for massive jobs which take many hours to complete (instead of days on one machine).

 

[Krevnik]

Ah, but I would like to point out that it is possible to do some of this stuff IF you can pipe the parts of video over the line... Xgrid could help make a renderfarm easier to manage, but it definitely isn't for photoshop or the like... heck, I am just curious how long it will take to compute the factorial of 1 million on a decent sized Xgrid cluster.

 

[isgoed]

Peer2Peer Computing?

I am wondering if XGrid can be used to use the computerpower of other users across the internet. Sort like peer 2 peer computing. Everybody on the internet just makes his computer available for computing and xgrid distributes all requests.

As i read it, it is not intended as so, since it only states examples where all the computers are controlled by a single entity (administrator/company/owner). Also the main use of it is intensive computing and any program that wants to take advantage of it needs to be rewritten.

What really would bring computing to the people was if I for example could use high computing power while i am traveling with my 550mhz powerbook. It would be nice if xgrid tasks can be handled in the background while the user is using his computer.

Or run your own Seti Project for example.