Hi. How do you do parallel computing using two iMacs (a Late 2015 5K one and a Late 2009 one)? What cables are needed and what software is needed?
Thank you.
God bless, Proverbs 31
iMac with Retina 5K display, macOS High Sierra (10.13.3), Late 2015 8GB M395 2TB Fusion Drive
You might contact these folks to see if they can help you. They showcase several examples of their customers who have successfully built parallel Mac clusters with computers older than both of yours.
http://daugerresearch.com/index.shtml
"Pooch software provides the easiest way to assemble and operate a high-performance parallel computer. We encourage you to follow the Mac Cluster Recipe and see for yourself."
Well, that's what parallel computing means. However, one thing you would need is to write an entirely new OS to support it. It's not something one can just buy a couple cables to hook up two or more computers to do.
An explanation is well beyond the scope of this forum.
I don't think two iMacs constitutes much of a Parallel Processing cluster, nor that they are suitable candidates in the first place to achieve much.
You would be better off getting serious hardware that can do the job using multiple cores, or simply run a lot faster than Apple's iMacs (an easy ask).
The video and music industries use handbuilt PCs or HP Workstations usually running Linux, although quite a few run macOS on these machines as well or farm out the processing over networks to hardware built for the job.
Sura 5.
Peter
Hi. For 3D rendering for example. How do you make two or more Macs work together (dividing the processes using their GPU, CPU, memory resources and maybe even the hardrives as RAID) to make it function like one faster computer (making it a 8 core, dual GPU computer effectively)?
What exactly do you mean by "parallel computing"? I think it may have a different meaning than you think.
Just to add to what woodmeister50 said, it may actually be slower than running the 5k Mac alone.
FWIW, the Dauger Research site hasn't been updated in about 6 years.
not much
Some years ago, there used to be a distributed computing feature available on Macs running 10.4 to 10.7 called XGrid, but I am not aware of anything like that for current Macs. Some universities had built their own clusters using Macs, similar to linux clusters, back in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xgrid
http://www.stat.ucla.edu/computing/clusters/deployment.php
The SETI@home project uses a form of parallel computing, anyone can download and run their software to help out with the effort:
https://setiathome.berkeley.edu/
Since MacOS X is based on UNIX you might try looking at OpenMPI (Message-Passing-Interface) you would need to have software that is built to take advantage of MPI. This is typically used by people who write their own software (academic/scientific) to take advantage of the MPI libraries, not sure if the particular application you are using can use MPI or not. Something to look into, I am not sure if there is a simple set up for home use. You usually want as fast a network connection between the two computers since they may exchange large amounts of data.
Current Macs do take advantage of the multi-core processors, so they are already doing a form of parallel processing. MPI can support running software on multiple processors on the same machine, or on different networked machines.
FWIW, the only viable interface between the two computers
due to the age disparity would be via Ethernet. This would end
up being a bottleneck and the minimal gains achieved in performance
from such an old computer would be essentially cancelled out.
XGrid was only available under Mac OS X versions from 10.4 to 10.7.
Apple has a new product called Qmaster which is part of Compressor, but can also be used with other software, possibly if they have a UNIX command line, like GNU/linux software. This will efficiently share audio-video encoding tasks among the different clustered computers, might be some other rendering software that would work with it also. Your best bet would be to find someone who is actually doing that kind of work and find out how they are doing it, check for a local Mac User Group or university. Even if one of the computers is slower than the other, you will still see some benefit of parallel computing being able to complete the task faster than on either computer alone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Qmaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressor_(software)
I hope some of this info points you in the right direction. Good luck with your 3D rendering project.
Hi. XGrid, that's familiar, I've heard that before. That might work. I wonder if it's hidden somewhere in High Sierra, in Terminal.
XGrid was discontinued almost 6 years ago.
How Do You Do Parallel Computing Using Two iMacs?
