Apple peels back Xgrid technology

Virtual IT environment gets to the core of computational clustering

Robert Jaques

Apple has jumped on the grid computing bandwagon with the development of a computational clustering technology dubbed Xgrid.

Developed by Apple's Advanced Computation Group, the platform is designed to assist scientists and academics working in compute intensive environments.

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Xgrid combines the processing power of all available networked IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid-enabled 'virtual' IT environment to execute batch and workload processing.

With Xgrid running on Xserve G5 servers in a 42U rack, up to 84 Power PC G5 processors can be clustered to create a supercomputer with 1.5 teraflops of processing power.

Available as a free beta download from www.apple.com, Xgrid is already being used to power the BLAST gene-sequencing application on multiple Macs using Apple's Rendezvous networking technology.

"The Xgrid BLAST application enables bioinformatics researchers to perform distributed BLAST searches on a cluster running the Xgrid software," said Richard Scheller, senior vice president of research at Genentech.

"We tested Xgrid BLAST by querying DNA sequence files for matches against multi-gigabyte genomic databases on a cluster of four dual-processor Xserves."

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