Pooch cluster software for MacOSXHuntington Beach 17 October 2001 Dauger Research announced version 1.1 of Pooch, the Parallel OperatiOn and Control Heuristic application. The latest update introduces its implementation of the AppleScript interface with a host of new features. In addition, Pooch is fully operational and fully supported on Mac OS X 10.1.
The announcement arrives following the presentation of a major industry
award to Pooch. On October 10 at the IEEE Cluster 2001 Conference, Pooch
was awarded the "Best Commercial Exhibit - Software" prize "for most
innnovative commercial software product" exhibited at that international,
leading-edge, and authoritative conference on cluster computing.
Pooch is designed to combine powerful, numerically-intensive
parallel-computing clusters with the famed ease-of-use of the Macintosh. It
provides the user interface for the latest incarnation of AppleSeed, a
project begun by a pair of UCLA physics researchers in 1998. Their software
is used world-wide for easy-to-use and numerically-intensive parallel
computing.
Pooch's new AppleScript implementation opens a wealth of new possibilities
for parallel computer users. Jobs may be launched using scripts customized
and automated for any particular task. That includes both transient and
persistent scripts, such as for customized, automated job queuing tasks.
Directing Pooch from OS X's Unix command line is available via a free,
open-source utility named plaunch, which operates by translating Unix
options into AppleScript commands and executing scripts from the command
line. In addition, other applications may use AppleEvents, the
communications structure upon which AppleScript is based, to direct Pooch
to launch jobs that perform computational tasks. A demonstration of that
ability to automate parallel executable launches is present in the latest
AltiVec Fractal Carbon demo, available from the Dauger Research web site.
The new version of Pooch also introduces a wide array of new features and
bug fixes. The new features include the addition of a heuristic algorithm
to utilize the "best" resources found in the cluster, making "Computing
Grid"-like behavior possible. Optimizations to Pooch's network
implementation were made, improving file transfer speed and launch times.
Other features provide OS X-specific abilities, such as Unix-based load
measurement of processes and the ability to recognize and parallel launch
executables compiled via GCC.
Pooch v1.1 is available now at US$150 for the first compute node then
US$100 for each node thereafter. Current users with an active subscription
to Pooch will be receiving their free updates shortly.
Pooch requires networked Macintoshes running OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.2 or
later or OS X 10.1 or later with 4 MB of available RAM and 2 MB of disk
space.
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