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Hi All. I have bee trawling the internet for details how to put a series of mac mini into a cluster to act as one or even be able to mirror one to the other. This was shown in the launch and there are plenty of images of people doing it but no details. Can anyone point in the direction of how to do it?
Thank you
I do not know of any way to connect any Macs into a distributed shared memory compute farm, like a MOSIX or OpenSSI cluster. The only systems for that I am familiar with are all Linux based and do not support Mac OS. Plus as cloud compute prices drop, it’s simpler to just spool up a virtual large shared resource machine in a/the cloud somewhere and use that as needed (defaulting back to an inexpensive minimal machine when not).
Server farms/racks with failover are an option I believe with any Mac - e.g. https://www.macminivault.com/services/custom/. Seems the business model is more along the lines to offer it as a service though not a consumer or small deployment hardware solution.
I do not know of any way to connect any Macs into a distributed shared memory compute farm, like a MOSIX or OpenSSI cluster. The only systems for that I am familiar with are all Linux based and do not support Mac OS. Plus as cloud compute prices drop, it’s simpler to just spool up a virtual large shared resource machine in a/the cloud somewhere and use that as needed (defaulting back to an inexpensive minimal machine when not).
Server farms/racks with failover are an option I believe with any Mac - e.g. https://www.macminivault.com/services/custom/. Seems the business model is more along the lines to offer it as a service though not a consumer or small deployment hardware solution.
Apple used to do some clustering capabilities themselves but along with their server software have given up on this. They did have software called XGrid to do this. See - https://www.apple.com/server/docs/Xgrid_TB_v10.4.pdf
To otherwise do clustering requires software written to take advantage of this and to implement this. Some video software for the Mac has this built-in. However as mentioned by Michael there are various open source implementations.
It is not clear if MacMiniVault use an open source implementation or their own. Regardless nothing will 'cluster' standard Mac applications e.g. Word or PhotoShop.
You cannot used them as a single shared memory device.
But all you need to cluster any set of computers is an Ethernet switch, and some appropriate software to manage and use a distributed or parallel computing environment. By far the most used OS for that is Linux (and in its day, XServe). There are abundant resources on how to use any set of computers with an eithernet switch to create a Beowulf type cluster. The actual term Beowulf cluster came from the ability to leverage open source Linux and any off the shelf computers to put together a compute cluster. Even furby’s have been used for clusters. You can cluster any Mac computers - Virginia Tech had at one point one of the world’s fastest parallel compute clusters all made from desktop Apple G5 towers (they were using XServe, but could have used a Linux distribution instead).
Exactly how you choose to cluster any set of computers depends entirely on what you intend to use the cluster for, and whether the task(s) you want to run can even be distributed across a cluster (not every problem can be parallelized).
Bottom line though is that creating a cluster isn’t plug and play or point and click.
Thanks Michael for the reply. I have read many post from other users regarding this and it appears that Apples keynote on the release of the MacMini 2018 was rather misleading. We believe in fact that the images used were for the purpose of a render farm for final cut pro rather than a cluster using Apple's Compressor app.
The reason for the original question was to be able to create an OSX Server with shared processing power shared across multiple mac mini's or even just two.
This has now lead discussion onto another topic of failover option, if one Mac MacMini running OSX Server fails can it failover to another? Its seems that years ago this was possible but now since the deceased xserve and xsan its not a viable option, would you agree?
Cheers
Mac Mini 2018 - How to create cluster of Mac Mini's
