Wired Article Features PowerMac Based Super Clusters

by , 10:00 AM EST, January 30th, 2002

A wired article that ostensibly focuses on Apple's new PowerMac towers actually shines more of a spotlight on the benefits and ease of use of clustering Apple's product line. Clustering is the name given to building parallel super computers by using many off-the-shelf normal PCs. The Wired article talks about the AppleSeed project which uses Open Transport and Mac OS X to quickly and easily build very powerful super computers out of PowerMacs. According to the AppleSeed folks quoted in he article, it is so easy to do this with Apple's technology that you only need one page of instructions. From the article:

A few years ago, Decyk and a pair of colleagues began playing around with G3 Macintoshes and were impressed with their performance.

"Not only was the performance faster than the Pentiums but it was comparable to the performance achieved on some Crays," the team said in a report. Further investigation showed that Macs are very easy to hook into parallel clusters and perform extremely well, thanks to the PowerPC chips and Mac OS X.

Clusters are becoming an increasingly common way to perform supercomputer tasks on the cheap. Simply hook up a bunch of off-the-shelf computers and set them to work in parallel on complex problems. Most clusters are based on Pentium machines that run Linux. But according to Dauger, Linux clusters require a PhD to set up and to run. By contrast, Mac clusters are so easy to make, even 11-year-olds can do it.

"There's a book called How to Build a Better Beowulf that's 230 pages long and tells you how to set up clusters with Linux," Dauger said. "We have a one-page manual (PDF) that shows you how to do it on PowerMacs. We've had high school students do it. We've had junior high school students do it. We even had a sixth grader in Hawaii do it."

"It took NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory two weeks to put together a 16-node Linux cluster." he added. "I could do the same thing in less than an hour."

Dauger added that Linux clusters are extremely fragile: If all the machines in the cluster aren't running the same version of the kernel, everything grinds to a halt. By contrast, a Macintosh cluster can be made from a mix of G3 and G4 Macs running Mac OS 9 or X.

There is a lot more information on the subject in the full article, and we recommend it as a good read. Thanks to TMO Forum member rjung for pointing us to this article.

The Mac Observer Spin:

Being a mainstream tech publication, this sort of article that is highly complimentary to Apple and Apple technology is a great thing to help win increased mind share for the Mac platform. It's also a nice contrast to the sort of negatively-slanted coverage we still occasionally see from some mainstream outlets. It's particularly enjoyable to see this outstanding project get some exposure. The AppleSeed project has been doing some outstanding work, and in an age when super clusters are becoming more common, it would be great to see the Mac take a more prominent role.

Our favorite quote from the article reflects what so many Mac users know, and PC users either don't get or refuse to admit: using your computer should not be hard or challenging. The article specifically touts the ease of use in administering an AppleSeed cluster.

Dauger, who is 29 and a recent graduate of UCLA with a physics doctorate, formed Dauger Research a short time ago to commercialize his expertise in Macintosh cluster computing. He sells parallel-processing software, called Pooch, and offers his services as a consultant to help build clusters.

However, he hasn't done any consulting yet because all of his clients have figured it out for themselves. All they need are a few G4 Macs, some Ethernet cables, a hub and the Pooch software. Getting it up and running is as simple as installing the software and configuring it through a couple of dialog boxes.

In an era where idiot IT people think that the idea of *needing* Microsoft certification (MSCE) in order to run a Windows network is somehow a good thing, it's great to see a splash of reality tossed about where non-Mac users might see it.

Wired Article