X Grid (for OSX users)

[NickT]

Hello all
Looking for someone who might know about X grid. X grid is cluster processing which is built in to OSX. What it means is that machines on a network (or internet) can share processing cycles, this is how SETI works.

There's some information from apple here

I have seen this in action at Photokina with flexcolor , just have no idea how to set it up.. Any ideas folks

Nick-T

Edit more info here

[robertpoll]

Hi Nick,

What was flex using xgrid to to at photokina? Was it processing multiple files for output or something along those lines? The main problem with these kinds of frameworks (and they have been around for a very long time - PVM was one of the first I think,  nearly 20 years ago) is that the application has to divide up its work into chunks it can send to other machines for processing. This means that 1) the task has to be easily sub-dividable and 2) the application has to be adapted to work with the grid software. There certainly are some applications that are suitable, and there are instances where it's been very successfully used but it's relatively rare.

I'm a bit surprised hasselblad bothered doing anything with Flex to be honest - it doesn't seem like a particularly good fit for this kind of framework, aside perhaps from processing to tiff. Given the gap in performance between flex/phocus and other apps like lightroom I think their time would be better spent optimizing the code rather than developing for grids. Add to that the fact that most studios only have a handful of computers. Harnessing the power of machines on the internet isn't something i'd see working for flex/phocus either as the fff files would need to be shipped out to them for processing which would probably take as long as processing the file locally. For it to work you need to do a lot of processing on a small amount of data.

Sorry to be a bit negative, and if anyone has any more info that give a more positive picture than above I'd be interested to hear :-)

...rob

p.s. the second link that Nick posted is a good overview - worth a read if you're interested

[NickT]

Hi Robert
These guys were using X Grid to process files at amazing speeds using Flexcolor. I'd love to be able to use the 6 machines on our local network to process large numbers of files..

Nick-T

[robertpoll]

Hi Nick,

I'd guess the way it was done was by writing a script that fires up flex and controls it externally to make it process the files. I had a quick look at what AppleScript can do and it looks like it's possible. I'm not an AppleScript expert but it can control applications via their gui. I'm assuming flex/phocus don't support AppleScript natively and can't find any command line options to control the app - either of which would be better. If this works it should be relatively easy to set it up for Xgrid (or something like PVM which I think would work across of and mac).

If I get a minute I'll take a look at the AppleScript control (with Phocus). If we can male it work maybe we can ask hblad to give us some command line options to make it a bit more robust.

...rob