OpenMacGrid Computing Grid for Mac Users Announced

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MacResearch.org announced on Monday the first wide-scale, publicly accessible computing grid based on Appleis Xgrid technology called OpenMacGrid. Anyone using Mac OS X Tiger or later and an Internet connection can donate CPU cycles to assist researchers with compute intensive tasks in a fashion similar to SETI@home.

OpenMacGrid will be open to any scientist who submits a proposal that is approved. Scientists can apply for access to OpenMacGrid at the MacResearch.org Website.

There is no software for the host users to install, and their system is is managed by system preferences and a specially developed Dashboard widget. System requirements and setup for users have been posted.

More information is available from David Gohara at MacResearch.org.

TMO notes that if the average daily, idle processing power for most Macs were in the vicinity of a gigaflop, then a million Apple contributors to this project would create the current holy grail supercomputer for scientists: a collective one petaflop. That is, assuming that the codes can properly exploit a distributed computing model called, by the community, "Embarassingly parallel."

John Martellaro

John Martellaro

John Martellaro was born at an early age and began writing about computers soon after that. He is a former U.S. Air Force officer and has worked for NASA, White Sands Missile Range, Lockheed Martin Astronautics, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Apple. At Apple he worked as a Senior Marketing Manager, a Federal Account Executive and a High Performance Computing manager. His interests include skiing, chess, science fiction and astronomy. You can follow John on Twitter at twitter.com/jmartellaro.

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