Re: Xcode... - rendezvous + cluster
Re: Xcode... - rendezvous + cluster
- Subject: Re: Xcode... - rendezvous + cluster
- From: Wade Tregaskis <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:33:24 +1000
BTW, I think that the new "Distributed Build" feature of XCode has
been overlooked in the preliminary discussions here. Putting to use
a large percentage of the idle cycles from [all?] computers on the
local net, appears it should knock several orders of magnitude off of
build times. I wonder what will need to be installed on the hosts of
this "build farm"?
yeah, rendezvous to achieve clustering. very much like the idea of
that. is that fairly "easy" does anyone know? i suppose there's much
more to it than rendezvous. rendezvous is from a very surface p-o-v:
it sets up the initial connection. doesn't os x kind of just use what
processors are available without you having to split up and deal the
processing out to the various processors automatically? - that's part
of the os right? or not? if it is, then in theory rendezvous + cluster
would be pretty achievable? maybe?
What you've described is effectively what's being pushed as 'grid
computing'. It is not a part of the OS - it is a whole new world in
which to find exotic problems. Not the least of which is security -
would you trust anyone with network access to your machine to run code
on it?
Xcode probably runs a very simple and very dumb daemon which simply
takes the source and some sort of limited makefile, and returns the
compiled object files back to the originator. [As an aside, I don't
see how it could effectively distribute the linking phase, so there
probably won't be much benefit for projects with hundreds of tiny
object files.]
I'm working on a generic distributed processing system at the moment,
and have been for the last 6 months. Unfortunately, while it's not
difficult to do the basics (thus the reason it's common in 3d rendering
apps and the like), a generic system cannot make any assumptions about
use and trust like a particular system can, and so security becomes a
major problem. You might want to look at Pooch for the best
general-purpose currently available, although it does have a lot of
potential security issues, and limitations as a result.
If Apple include systrace in a near-future release (hint hint), some of
the security problems will be solved. Last I heard they were having a
serious look into it, so anyone who's interested in seeing systrace
included should send their favourite Apple representative a business
case for it.
Wade Tregaskis
-- Sed quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
_______________________________________________
cocoa-dev mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/cocoa-dev
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.