Apple today previewed Xgrid, a computational clustering technology from Apple’s Advanced Computation Group (ACG). “Xgrid helps scientists and others working in compute intensive environments to fully utilize all IT resources, including desktops and servers, by creating a grid enabled ‘virtual’ IT environment that takes advantage of unused computing capacity to run batch and workload processing. Available as a free beta download today, Xgrid brings Apple’s legendary ease-of-use to computational clustering by providing the easiest way to run compute intensive applications, such as the popular gene-sequencing application BLAST, on multiple Macs using Apple’s Rendezvous networking technology.” Apple said customers from NASA, Genentech, Simon Fraser University, Reed College and Virginia Tech have been testing the new technology on clusters of Mac desktops, portables and servers.
