[Radiance-general] Mac OSX, xgrid and RADIANCE

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Kirk Thibault wrote:

> Has anyone using Mac OSX with RADIANCE tried rigging the OSX built-in  
> xgrid app to distribute rendering and general crunching over a  
> cluster of Macs?
>
> http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid.html
>
> Apple makes it seem so simple to gather yourself up a little  
> supercomputer.

Yeah, just like the way they make their Windows support for XServe look 
simple.  The reality is a whole lot different!  In fairness, they do 
provide a bunch of excellent command-line tools for managing the samba 
support in OSX Server, it's just that they make it look like you never 
need anything but the GUI, which is pure fantasy.  But this is a 
Radiance list so I'll stop talking about Windows and XServes...

Kirk, I hadn't seen this xGrid before; this is something they added with 
10.4 (I'm still on 10.3 and an OLD Powerbook) and it looks interesting!  
However, there is a long history of file locking issues with Radiance 
and multiple machines.  The archives probably contain two or three 
threads about this topic with respect to Linux.  I'd be really 
interested to hear what Greg thinks of this new Apple tool, and its 
possibilities, though. 

Rob Guglielmetti