Grid in the Mainstream

I was readingthis entryonSippeyand got to thinking. This seems like it would be a natural extension of Mac OS X. Apple already has Rendezvous and Xgrid. It would be an interesting solution to see the combined into a transparent, ubiquitous processing solution.

Imagine if you will, a small network of machines running Mac OS X. Now, in your sharing system prefs, you have an item that says "Share idle processor time" along with a slider that indicates a maximum shared percentage. You would also have a system preference which held settings for which machines to connect to (which would be populated via rendezvous), at what processor load to start off loading jobs to other machines, and etc.

Now there would no doubt have to be some smarts going on behind the scenes. There are only certain types of jobs you would want to distribute. Heavy video and photo work, and compiling come to mind. But when MS Word is spiking your processor while hanging, you don’t want it polluting that out across multiple machines. Also, you would need to have relatively low latency links between machines, which may preclude wireless or internet sharing except for very heavy work. But none of this is impossible. Most of the framework is there, it just needs to be implemented in a easy to use, transparent way. And Apple does that better than anyone.

This could be a major business selling point, especially to Video and Graphics houses who Apple likes to target specifically. Even in situations where you have multiple users who are fairly processor intensive, there are still a lot of unused cycles that can be leveraged into a processing pool. Even mom and pop, sitting at home rendering out their iMovies and preparing home DVDs would see a huge increase from having just one other machine on the network.

While I doubt this is something that apple is currently working on, It’s something they should be taking seriously. Some users would opt to have 2 single processor machines, opting to have the flexibility of having 2 machines for multiple users, but knowing the processing power is still there when they need it. This means more CPU sales for Apple. It would also be another visionary first for Apple. Distributed computing is where the industry is going. People are getting more comfortable with having multiple computers in one house. Apple could be the first kid on the block to have this particular toy, and it would be a cool toy indeed.

Posted by Joe Mullins at April 23, 2004 06:48 PM |TrackBack