Is anyone else thinking HandBrake encodes?!
Xoreax grids up Windows to goose apps
Grid computing is nothing new, but Xoreax, a company that created a set of tools to distribute the job of building and compiling applications across a network of PCs and servers, has come up with a new twist on the idea. It's called process virtualization, and when implemented in a more general purpose "virtual supercomputer" …
-
Tuesday 20th March 2012 16:43 GMT Tim Parker
"The XGE grid software of Xoreax ... draws on some aspects of these earlier grid approaches and then takes a different approach"
Given that the method alluded to in the article is as old as the hills, i'm intrigued about what exactly is different here.... The Xoreax website itself is relatively fact free on the details, even in case studies, and having had a read through i'm struggling to see what this is beyond a front end onto some XML configuration files and a process queue.
Much is made of how little - "If Any" (tm) - changes need to be made to the applications but the examples suggest that it's just a "spread the work-load and hoover up the files" distributed framework. Anyone who has used anything like distcc, PVM, LSF OpenLava etc, any of the existing grid frameworks already mentioned or rolled there own (many of us no doubt) will wonder quite what the fuss its.
Oooo - but you can get "up to X20" speed-ups according to several places on their own website... hmm, I think they may have something a bit wrong there - I have a hard time believing any of their listed clients would pay for that level of acceleration (it's what you get from buying a half-decent machine). Some details on potential scale-ups would be nice.. come to that, "some details" full-stop.
All in all, this strikes me as a press release that's come through pretty much un-scathed - would I be terribly misguided about that ?
-
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
