>


One of our training labs was recently remodeled, and all the machines were replaced with G5's. With the recent release of the XGrid software, I would be remiss not to kick the tires a bit, so here we go :)

First, a screenshot.

Next, a bunch of movies. Be advised that these are unedited, so there are a few false starts, but I decided to include it all.

xgrid configuration
The configuration of an XGrid controller. I disabled the password protections because I'm on a closed network; if you are on a larger network, you might leave these enabled. Though there is a facility for executing arbitrary shell commands on agents (password protected or not) they run as the user 'nobody', so about the worst I would expect of unauthorized access would be my machine being really busy when I'm not around, which is probably a good thing in anyway :) Also be advised that all of the computer names in your grid must be unique. Because all our lab machines are imaged from the same source (and because they didn't do any post-imaging hostname scripts), they all had the same name, which had me pretty frustrated for a bit, since only one instance of the name will ever appear to the controller.

launching xgrid
Launching XGrid and viewing grid membership

the mandelbrot plugin
Here I show the mandelbrot plugin. As you can see, this isn't ideal for sustained workload on fast machines.

the factoring plugin
This plugin allows for sustained computation on fast machines, unlike with mandelbrots. Be aware that my factoring skills are essentially nonexistant, which is why I'm totally guessing at suitable start values.

alt take of mandelbrot, factoral
This one was an earlier attempt that occured before I cleaned out the stale entry in the agent list. It starts with mandelbrots, including looking at top -ud during execution of mandelbrot sets to see network activity. I mentioned the number of input / output packets, when I really meant bytes.

dynamically adding agents as they become available
For this demo, I quickly rebooted most of the machines and then started a job. As machines come up, they automatically register with the controller and are given work to do.

crashing xgrid with bad data
This is what happens when you don't know how to properly use the factoring plugin. What ended up happening is that the excessive number of machine passes combined with the fact that each job was very short caused a whole bunch of output files to be dumped on my desktop. Even after I killed XGrid, WindowServer was going nuts trying to draw all the icons (about 5016 of them) onto the desktop. Fortunately I had terminal open... Also, every one of the factoral output files I looked at had what appeared to be a memory allocation error. My guess is that my starting numbers were large enough that there was not enough memory (each machine has 1.5 GB of ram).

WindowServer having a fit
What happens when you accidentally dump over 5000 files on your desktop?


I guess all I need now is a really complex problem to solve... Somebody write me a pi plugin ;) I would also like to add, for thsoe of you who are compelled to look at the page source, though I understand all about passing arguments when calling functions, due to my rather shoddy scripting skills, I often spend more time writing a script or figuring out how to code something than I would spend doing it the long way. Plus I don't think I really wanna know that much javascript. eww ;) -dre@mac.com, 3/31/04.