MacResearch Introduces OpenMacGrid 123
Drew McCormack writes "MacResearch.org has just introduced OpenMacGrid. It is a distributed computing grid similar to SETI@home, but unlike other networks, it is built up entirely of Macs utilizing Xgrid, and access is unrestricted. Anyone with Mac OS X 10.4 can donate cycles, and any scientist with a reasonable project can burn cycles."
Movie studios and CGI (Score:1)
Re:Movie studios and CGI (Score:5, Informative)
This only works in a LAN. Every single frame of a modern movie requires gigabytes of texture data etc. etc... It's not something you can send over the Internet.
Not to mention (Score:2)
Not to mention I'm sure they'd be thrilled to have basically the entire movie contents floating around the Internet on random people's computers.
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Of course, there's the problem if you manage not only to catch every single piece, decrypt the bitmaps, -and- manage to put 'm in the right order. However, the amount of
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That service has data locality to their farm. Rendering over generic nodes on the internet won't give you that locality of data. Or you will have hundreds of clients streaming 20 GB of data to their machine to do 4 hours worth of work. It just isn't worth it.
Terminology (Score:4, Funny)
Kind of makes me hungry... (Score:2, Funny)
From my general vegan perspective: could instead call each node an apple. Get it? apples on tree branch grid. Dynamic with key word Macgrid.
What constitutes 'reasonable'? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:What constitutes 'reasonable'? (Score:5, Funny)
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Damn, I was gonna buy one tomorrow, but I'll wait. Thank you!
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Who are you, think secret?
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giantShinyBeowulfCluster.task = motive;
giantShinyBeowulfCluster.mainScreen.turnOn (1);
}
else{
giantShinyBeowulfCluster.dDos (sender);
}
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2. Present every client with a short one-liner describing the new project.
3. Let the user of the client decide whether to donate CPU on a project-by-project basis.
What I don't get is why this is Mac-only. Are Windows/Linux truely less able to perform these tasks or is it just a Mac promotional campaing under the guise of "research"? Seems illogical to me to keep out 95%+ of available CPU time if all you intend is to provide the research community with CPU time.
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Re:What constitutes 'reasonable'? (Score:5, Informative)
Trojans? (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.macresearch.org/contribute_to_openmacg
So, Xgrid-experts, what kind of permissions does an application like this have? Is it sandboxed somehow?
Re:Trojans? (Score:5, Informative)
Xgrid jobs run as user 'nobody', which is decently safe, with process limits so it can't forkbomb you to death. A rogue job could fill up
You still need to trust OpenMacGrid to keep these bad jobs off the grid.
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Sounds like an ideal candidate for chrooting
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Just make a file of whatever size you want to limit the jobs to, format it HFS+, mount it and chroot to it. Problem solved?
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Do Macs support loopback devices?
Do they ever. The disk image mounting in OS X makes Linux's loopback devices look like crap. While you can make an image containing only a filesystem you can also make one containing a full disk image (including MBR and everything). When mounted it will for example show up as /dev/disk2 (whole disk), /dev/disk2s1 (first partition), /dev/disk2s2 (second partition) and so on. Makes disk recovery of an imaged disk a shitload easier because you don't have to go through the laborious task of calculating of
botnet (Score:3, Interesting)
Grid computing is essentially botnet, trying to use that concept for good scientific purpose.
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It's becoming more common to assign each daemon its own user, but so long as your process doesn't write any files there's not much security benefit to having your own user, and there is a convience aspect to having fewer users to man
Java Web Start (Score:1)
For example, I just put up this Java Web Start http://master.gallery.hd.org/_AI/remote.jsp [hd.org] project to enable people to help along my little AI project. It is entirely in the sandbox, and is careful with bandwidth and memory and CPU usage. But you don't have to trust m
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Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)
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-Eric
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Alot of the problem was the 1.4 GHz mac you are referring to was a PPC G4.... crippled by a 133 or 167 Mhz system bus. Were the PPC chips allowded to go one gen further on the laptop side (desktop remedied at onset G5 w/ sys bus at 1/2 CPU clock) then this problem would've ceased to be.
Macs never really saw the full benefit of the G4 due to the system bus...sad. Motorola had them ready to go in a highly efficient laptop form, I think w/
imagine.... (Score:4, Funny)
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Well then, it's quite clear that they don't have one: Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections. :)
They'd better not use the same MySQL database for storing grid results... I can picture the headlines now: "Cure for Cancer Lost Because of Traffic from Geek Website."
Curious indeed (Score:4, Interesting)
One thing quite curious, the "introduction" images are almost direct yanks from xgrid@stanfard [stanford.edu] including the Dashboard widget the push as their own from the xgrid widget SDK [mekentosj.com] linked with the xgrid@stanford project as well.
Should be interesting how this shapes up. 91 total agents right now, 0 working
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Obligatory one... (Score:2, Offtopic)
Usefulness? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Usefulness? (Score:5, Informative)
OpenMacGrid uses Xgrid, which is Mac-only. It isn't something new they've made: it's built-in to Mac OS X. You ask "how hard is it...", and the answer is "A lot harder than just using what's already available."
Also, the Xgrid agent doesn't have a pretty window. It's a background daemon.
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I organise cross-platform distributed computing projects, and without exception the actual number-crunching code is an console application, plain C - not even any #ifs, and the only thing that is platform specific is a tiny wrapper script. The wrapper script I use is a Perl one that sits silently in a text console, or hung up, or started from init or cron. There's nothing to stop someone writing a GUI one in Tcl/Tk
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And Xgrid only works on macs. sine it is just a daemon for the client there isn't any reason why it couldn't be ported to any other *nix, but that is up to apple to do. A simple google search would show you that someone has already duplicated xgrid's functionality with the help of apple. Tying at least Linux boxes into the client network. It looks like it hasn't taken off, but then again neither has xgrid. maybe this project will he
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But probably very pretty. Enjoy your eye-candy.
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Um, no it isn't. OpenMacGrid is just an Xgrid controller. There is no GUI. You enter the address into the built-in Mac OS X Sharing Preferences pane, check a box, and you're done.
it hasn't taken off, but then again neither has xgrid
I'm not sure what your criteria are for "taking off", but Xgrid has been pretty successful. I think it doesn't get much press because the majority of grids are not public.
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Without exception? Are you sure nobody ever does any vectorization outside of what the compiler does? Ever? Nobody ever links to platform-specific frameworks for any reason? Ever? Nobody ever writes code to run on a homogenous cluster? Ever?
Being tied to XGrid is an truly abysmal design in comparison.
In your case perhaps it wo
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What I wrote was
"""
I organise cross-platform distributed computing projects, and without exception the actual number-crunching code is an console application, plain C
"""
And you intepret that as something like
"all distributed projects without exception
Please leave the 'reply' button alone until you learn to read.
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If you weren't trying to generalize about distributed projects, then what the hell was your point?
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Which should be obvious to anyone with a brain.
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Wow, that's a whopper. No wonder I missed it. Portable code is portable. Dang. You should get an award.
and that this is a far superiour way of doing things than restricting yourself to one single minority platform.
It is not superior in all cases. In fact, it is quite inferior for the target audience who (as I have already stated) may be part of an all-Mac lab already, may be using the Accelerate framework,
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Note, however, that I didn't need you to point that out twice, unlike my self-evident truth which you needed to have explained to you.
If you worked things out first time, you'd optimise your brain use by 50%!
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Even worse than that, it is tied to 10.4. Anyone who hasn't upgraded can't participate. Last time I played with Xgrid, it transmitted the application along with the unit of work. Sure, it makes it easy to just build a universal binary and load it onto the controller, but why not have multiple builds on the controller and have the agent indicate the OS level when it requests work? The controller could then send the appropriate build down.
/. effect good? (Score:3, Interesting)
Dead simple. The process is still running at 0.0% so i guess i haven't been assigned anything yet.
First time that
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People kill for the kind of exposure Slashdot brings. That's why we get Astroturfed [wikipedia.org] occasionally.
Re-Enactment (Score:2, Insightful)
Person 1: "Hey, I've got an idea!"
Person 2: "Yeah?"
Person 1: "Yeah! Let's make a compute grid... except, it won't be like those other compute grids. Except, it kinda will. But it won't. But that's not the point. People will be able to submit their own projects!"
Person 2: "Oh, you mean like BOINC, GPU, The World Community Grid, distributed.net, Leiden, Grid.org, OurGrid..."
Person 1: "Well, uh... yeah... I guess... except, um... let's run it on a Mac!"
Pe
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Papa Bear would say you hate freedom. Do you hate freedom, Doctor?
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Re:Re-Enactment (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you fully understand what you're talking about.
For starters, BOINC is not a separate grid. It's a framework and client for many grids. BOINC users can (and do) contribute to many different projects [berkeley.edu] including your "established projects" like Folding@Home and SETI@Home, and including many of the other grids you've listed. Many of the others you listed do exactly the kind of jobs you're calling for, like disease research.
Also, you seem to think that all grid computing projects are interchangeable, and that just isn't so. They may work with different data, or using different methods; they may not have the same requirements for job submission; they may operate on vastly different scales. Basically, they're suited for different research needs. A nice thing about OpenMacGrid, for example, is that researchers can take the same Xgrid job they've been using on their tiny network and send it to a public grid without much, if any modification.
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That's true - and the reason I'm not donating any cycles to Folding, though I otherwise would if they were on BOINC. I like that the BOINC projects get that I don't want to sysadmin more than one distributed computing client.
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I agree with your sentiments, but folding@home is a solid investment, seti is like buying tickets to a million-ball lottery.
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Spoken like a good engineer. Folding@Home has the potential to change how life is lived on Earth - a very good investment. SETI@Home has the potential to change what we think life is - a philosopher's game.
I wish Folding would get back to their BOINC client so I can easily donate some cycles to their project.
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If the proposal review doesn't insist on reviewing and archiving source code first, this could be the start of a nasty bot-net. Am I right?
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...and access is unrestricted. (Score:1, Informative)
Well, kind of. Except for the fact that you need a proprietary OS to access it. And proprietary hardware to go with it. It seems if you do not have the correct hardware and try to run this, Apple will sue the shit out of you [informationweek.com]. Why don't they make this compatable with all versions of FreeBSD, then call it unrestricted?
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Re:...and access is unrestricted. (Score:5, Insightful)
Practical limitations may apply without something violating a notion of "unrestricted." Sort of like how unrestricted Internet access in your home still requires you to have a computer or other suitable device; you can't just plug the Internet into your arm.
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Oooooh
Pitty, that would really put an interesting spin on the "donating cycles" phrase.
No... (Score:1, Insightful)
And an iPod.
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This situation is exactly like going to Wendy's and collecting 50c from each purchase, but letting McDonald's, Burger King, and Carl's Jr. sit it out.
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"...and access is unrestricted."
Well, kind of. Except for the fact that you need a proprietary OS to access it. And proprietary hardware to go with it. It seems if you do not have the correct hardware and try to run this, Apple will sue the shit out of you [informationweek.com] . Why don't they make this compatable with all versions of FreeBSD, then call it unrestricted?
But it would also require somebody to be able to read for comprehension. Since you didn't understand that article, that rules you out anyway.
Missing the point (Score:4, Interesting)
OpenMacGrid (or just OMG, I guess) uses XGrid, which is built-in to every OSX 10.4 distribution and acts just like any other job queue manager, except it's even easier. So, the whole process of writing a distributed computing project becomes far simpler as well.
Finally, the OMG it doesn't matter if the OMG is cross-platform running on proprietary hardware: so is every other cluster that I as a scientist have ever had access to. The SGI cluster is proprietary, and to an extent so is the Linux machine at our High-Performance Computing lab on campus. And, if you're thinking about it being non-cross-platform from the client side, well, you're probably not thinking differently anyway, so just go download Folding@Home.
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I see the difficulty of starting a distributed computing project as being a serious problem.
One solution I am proposing is borrowing some of the techniques from BitTorrent and using them in distributed computing. So far, the results have been very encouraging.
So here is a tidbit of my PhD research (an abstract from a paper hopefully being published soon):
"This paper describes the operational characteristics of "CompTorrent", a general purpose distributed computing platform that prov
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This looks really interesting, and using BitTorrent in tandem with a distributed computing queue scheduler (like XGrid, in the case of OMG) could provide not only the ability to effectively distribute coarse-grained tasks, but also efficiently share large input datasets for each process.
Thanks!
two ways to get more nodes on board (Score:4, Interesting)
It would also be to their benefit to introduce some competition. Contests like RC64 encouraged teamwork, and there were daily ranking boards where you could go see whose teams were knocking out the most units that day. There is no better motivator to encourage donation of resources than competition and bragging rights. Many of those teams were group oriented, there were things like TeamUnix, TeamMacinotosh, TeamUCLA, etc, and again that gives the nodes in each team a feeling of belonging to a group of people they can relate to, even if they have little in common.
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You're looking for BOINC [berkeley.edu].
Fan burnout a result? (Score:2, Interesting)
The last thing I want to happen as a result of being a participant is seeing my fan spooled up to 6000+ RPM day in and day out while my Mac crunches numbers, only to result in the fan itself crapping out a few months later.
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However, I will very likely set up my Mac Pro for this project when I get home tonight. It runs 24 hours/7 days since I have a small ftp server on it. It may as well be doing something else useful for other people while it's using the
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What about proprietary research? (Score:1)
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Question ... (Score:2)
Define "reasonable".
Site is now back up (Score:1)
What utter crap. (Score:2)
nobody 5606 100.0 -3.4 103580 70916 ?? RN 8:00PM 130:53.62 setiathome_5.13_powerpc-apple-darwin
nobody 5598 0.0 -0.3 28208 5508 ?? SNs 7:57PM 0:02.37
For a serious grid, sure I'd donate. But for what sure seems like an attempt to inflate some jack-off's seti at home score? Don't think so.
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