MacResearch

This is a brief update on the first week of operation of the OpenMacGrid. First of all, MacResearch would like to thank all the people who so generously donated Xgrid agents. Without your contributed Mac's power, the project would simply not have been possible. The response to our call for participation was overwhelming!

Currently, the OpenMacGrid has over 800 Macs connected. Since many of these Macs have more than two processor cores, this number translates to over 1000 processors, with a total computational power of over 2.0 Tera Hz (a Tera Hz is 1000 GHz!). At any given time, only a subset of these 800 agents are available for work. Its too early for us to be able to make a statistically fair statement of how many agents are actually available for work at any specfic moment. Very crudely, about a third of the total connected agents, would be a reasonable estimate for now.

These numbers went way beyond our expectations at MacResearch. And for that reason, early last week our servers had a rather difficult time keeping up with the web traffic that came our way. However, by now the OpenMacGrid is quite stable and ready for use. In fact, we have tested it using a variety of things over the past week. Charles Parnot (of the Xgrid@Stanford project) very kindly deployed some of his Xgrid ready jobs and tested the OpenMacGrid infrastructure for us. I myself, deployed some BOINC based (Einstein@Home, SETI@Home) jobs, again mainly for testing purposes. And right now, our very own Drew McCormack is using some of his Xgrid enabled binaries to test OpenMacGrid. Drew even wrote this page which very nicely describes how he prepared his binaries to run on the Xgrid. Take a look and see how easy it is!

Let me close this news update, by inviting people to consider using the OpenMacGrid for their research. If you have an idea for a project, please submit a proposal. Its a very simple form with just a few questions about your project. We at MacResearch will work with you, to the extent of our abilities to help you get your project deployed on the OpenMacGrid. Don't be discouraged if you've never used Xgrid before, we'll be glad to help! Good research being performed on the Xgrid, is critical to its success. Thank you.