Xgrid -- A first look at Apple's new cluster software

Computerworld - Like many of the Macintosh faithful, I watched Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld last week with anticipation, and I wasn't disappointed. The announcements about the new G5 Xserve and the beefed-up Xserve RAID were just what I had been hoping for in the data center (see story). And if those new iPod Minis were just $50 cheaper, I'd have bought two by now.
However, the most underplayed news, and yet the most interesting thing to emerge from the show in my view, was Apple's new Xgrid application. This software is aimed at scientific applications like gene sequencing, missile-trajectory calculations, cryptography and other incredibly compute-intensive applications that previously could be crunched only by supercomputers.
Apple has already proved it can deliver supercomputer technology with a cluster installation at Virginia Tech (see story), so what does Xgrid bring to the table?
In typical Apple fashion, Xgrid provides an easy-to-implement solution for two common problems in the scientific community: the lack of cheap computing power, and wasted cycles on unused desktops.
Think of Xgrid as a customizable SETI at Home software package for serious computing folk. The Xgrid software allows you to tie together any number of desktop machines (Apple suggests using those with G4 and G5 processors) to work as a single machine to process a job. When one of the computing hosts is idle, it can join the 'hive' and process part of the currently running job. For large research institutions, which often have huge student labs that are mostly idle from midnight to 6 a.m., this is a tremendous computing resource that can now be harnessed on the Mac side.
The software also allows for anyone with a modicum of programming knowledge to create his own plug-in enabling the Xgrid software to process custom jobs. Scientist/programmers are quite common in the biological sciences field and would be very comfortable with a Unix application that they can easily customize such as Xgrid. In fact, see it for yourself at Apple's Advanced Computation Group Web site.
I never write about something without taking it for a real-world test drive, so I downloaded the Xgrid software last week -- though it took me a few tries. The download link didn't respond in the Safari Web browser, nor could I access it from the Finder, so I tried a few other tricks, which you may need to use in order to get the software.
In the Finder, do a connect to server (Apple-k keyboard shortcut) at ftp://ftp.apple.com/developer/. Then go into the directory called