Xgrid Overview

By: James Reynolds - Revised: 2007-03-28 james

Introduction

Xgrid is an amazingly easy way to create a distributed computer.

The Student Computing Labs uses this technology to either run computationally intensive jobs that we have, or we contribute to other grids, such as Charles Parnot's Xgrid@Stanford project and MacResearch.org's OpenMacGrid.

We use Xgrid instead of other solutions because distributed computing is a small priority compared to our main duties. Using Xgrid, distributive computing is now easy enough that we can set it up in almost no time at all.

Table Of Contents
  • Headerdoc
    • View the headerdoc for Xgrid 1.0 here.

  • Snapshots
    • View snapshots of Xgrid 1.0 that demonstrate how to set up the agent, the controllor, and a grid and how to run a job.

  • O'Reilly Xgrid Presentation
    • At the O'Reilly 2004 Mac OS X Conference, James Reynolds presented on Xgrid and ran a demo grid.

  • WWDC/SIGGRAPH/BrickFest Movie
    • Read about and watch the POV-Ray movie shown at the 2004 WWDC, SIGGRAPH, and BrickFest DC conferences.

  • Xgrid Presentation
    • James Reynolds gave this Xgrid presentation at the February U of U's Mac Managers Meeting. James will demonstrate how easy it is to install, configure, and secure Xgrid. Better yet, James show Xgrid at work by rendering state of the art graphics using POV-Ray.

  • Xgrid POV-Ray Movie
    • In order to fully test Xgrid, we wanted to do some actual production work using it on a small set of test computers. Since I am very familiar with LDraw and POV-Ray, and after Daniel Côté published his article on using POV-Ray and Xgrid, it seemed natural to create a movie of LDraw models rendered by POV-Ray.