Snow Leopard™ Server

Chapter 18. Xgrid Service

In This Chapter

• Introduction to Xgrid

• Planning Xgrid distributed processing

• Xgrid setup and configuration

• Managing and monitoring Xgrid services

Xgrid is a feature of Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server that simplifies the creation, deployment, and management of computational grids, which distribute jobs across multiple computers to employ the idle capacity of those machines to perform complex tasks.

Xgrid enables users to submit jobs to be processed by a centrally managed cluster or by an ad hoc grid of Xgrid agent systems that are made available to handle jobs managed by an Xgrid controller.

Xgrid can be used to turn an organization's desktop machines into a distributed grid with super computing power at very little cost.

Because the Xgrid agent software is preinstalled with Mac OS X Leopard or later systems and is available for previous versions of the operating system, client systems are ready to be activated to turn their idle processors into a productive computing system cluster.

Apple notes the following features for Xgrid:

• Easy grid configuration and deployment

• Simple and flexible job submission

• Automatic controller discovery by agents and clients

• A flexible architecture based on open standards

• Support for the Unix security model, including password or Kerberos SSO authentication

• Choice between a command-line interface or an API-based model for grid interaction

This chapter describes how Xgrid works, what's involved in planning computational grid deployment, how it's ...