Clustering a few Macs

T

Travis86

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I do not own a current Mac, but I am looking into buying one. With the new G5 coming out, the prices of the other computers will drop. The cutting edge Macs seem to depreciate ten times faster than the older ones, and I don't know if I should wait for the price to go down on the new ones or buy an old one. Still, if everyone starts writing programs for the G5, I might be left behind because my computer can't handle the new fancy software.

Anyway, if I were to buy an older Mac, could I get another one like it and cluster the two when I find I'm being left behind? I know that two clustered computers aren't twice as fast, but it might give me the extra punch I need. Is this a good idea?
 
The only way that would work is if you are running a program designed to split work across the Macs. Such programs like render farms for digital animation where each frame is a separate task can be split up across many hundreds/thousands of clustered computers.

But, for general use, this would not work as you can't split the system across multiple computers.
 
Linux PPC might be your answer, there is clustering software available for linux. I don't know enough to speak more of it, but there's IS a difference between clustering and distributed computing, and what Captain Code described is distributed computing.
 
I think I see what you mean about splitting a problem up vs. splitting the system up. However, wouldn't it be possible to have two computers run two different programs, and link them together by having one report the interface information to the other through VNC? You would probably have to modify VNC so you could have floating windows. Otherwise, you'd just get a screenshot of the other computer.

Now that I think about it, I saw a program once that mixed the OS X windows with X11 windows so you could run Mac apps with Linux apps. I don't know how they did that, but couldn't someone write a program to mix the windows from one computer with the windows from another computer?
 
YellowDog Linux 3 (Sirius) is wonderful on older model macs. If I still had my iMac DV+ I'd have YDL on it.

As for X11, Apple released their own implementation of X11 so you can run XWindows apps inside Mac OS X 10.2 and above, seemlessly. As for the reverse, YDL (and other PPC-Linux flavours like Mandrake) has a similar implementation called Mac-On-Linux, which lets you run Aqua applications in an XWindows environment.

Now for a tangent...

I just wanted to add that I have found that Apple doesn't seem to believe in this thing called 'depriciation' ;)

I went to my local Mac retailer about a year ago and asked for an old clamshell G3 iBook; they told me the cheapest one they could sell me one for, which had been rented out to various clients for over a year, was 1900$.

Don't get the wrong idea, I am a totally devoted Apple supporter, and I will never go back to Windows-based machines; but it is a little discouraging that their hardware is, comparatively, so expensive. If you look at the price of hardware as newer hardware is released, it doesn't drop as quickly as your run-of-the-mill x86 machine.

Why? One of the major reasons is that with Apple, you're not just buying a G5 personal supercomputer, you're making a fashion statement. A good analogy: your typical ATX Dell tower is your Moores brand suit, and an Apple iMac TFT is a Valentino :cool:
 
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