AppleSeed Celebrates The Release Of OS X

The AppleSeed Web site has been updated to reflect changes brought about by the release of Mac OS X. AppleSeed is a site dedicated to providing information for creating and maintaining Mac based computing clusters. The release of OS X opens up a new world of opportunities in this area, and the AppleSeed folks are excited about the release. According to AppleSeed:

The AppleSeed web site has been updated. Many of the new features are in anticipation of widespread use of OS X in the coming year. Note: The latest release of OS X has known issues with our software. Apple has told us they will be fixed in a future release of OS X. Until then, you can prepare for parallel computing on X by using our latest software with CarbonLib on OS 9.The web siteis major additions and changes include:

  1. MacMPI_X: a new Carbonized MacMPI library. MacMPI_X is based on MacMPI_IP, inheriting the high performance of Appleis Open Transport TCP/IP implementation. Carbonized parallel applications that use MacMPI_X can run on both OS 9 with CarbonLib and OS X. Currently available in C only.

  2. Pooch: the debut of a new easy-to-use parallel computing operation utility for discovering nodes, launching parallel jobs, and monitoring nodes and parallel computations. Pooch uses TCP/IP exclusively for networking and is a Carbon application. It is ultimately meant for operation on OS X, but also operates on OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.2 or higher. It is the successor to the Launch Den Mother & Launch Puppy and is far more capable, including the ability to operate over the Internet.

  3. AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo: A new Fractal demo that now uses both AltiVec _and_ Multiprocessing for computation, taking advantage of multiple-G4 Macs, TCP/IP, via MacMPI_X, for communication, and the Carbon library, for running on both 9 and X. It has achieved over 6000 MegaFlops on a pair of Dual G4/450is. This demo even runs in parallel on a mix of OS 9 and OS X machines.

  4. Parallel Fractal Carbon GPL: A Carbonized version of the Gnu General Public License source code and project file for the Parallel Fractal Demo, now using MacMPI_X.

  5. Updates to the AppleSeed Recipe and the Frequency Asked Questions

You can find all of this and more at the AppleSeed Web site.