ThePanda

I finally managed to acquire XGrid and umm its currently running on local mode on my comp showing me all its computing and interface poweress…... I kindda downloaded it 5 secs back so I really haven’t had an opportunity to test programming usage, though I shalth say zat the Xgrid architecture itself (that is as a separate entity when compared to ze tasks themselves) puts considerable overheads on calculations which is y my 1GhZ PB G4 took 36.196 secs to draw a Mandelbrot set which my old 266MhZ PII cud draw in something like 5 secs, which is not to say zat Xgrid is bad, ‘coz it does get ze work done and has one of the most pleasant interfaces to work with, however the overhead leads to u requiring a minimum number of reasonably powerful Macs before u cud actually get ne true benefits, though what this number is depends not only on Xgrid but also on ze task at hand, since tasks which can be very easily divided into smaller multiprocessable tasks shud run better than those which r harder to subdivide and shud hence give better results, though running nething in local mode is still a pain…........... Umm I m still searching for one more mac to test Xgrid non locally, but lets c….. Oh and Xgrids FAQ mentions zat theoretically someone cud build a client which allows Xgrid’s processes to be run on other Unix systems, seeing zis in action wud be coooooooool….... Saddly currently provided dev support is worth nuthin so I am gonaa have to decipher wierdly worded things…. Lets hope I get wat these guys r talking abt…

Ze Panda
....off to figure out Xgrid….......

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 11th, 2004 at 3:34 am and is filed under article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.