Imagine waking up one day to find your Mac has solved a vexing scientific problem. While the cure to cancer, super-efficient solar power and ending world hunger are a ways off, you can combine your computing resources using Xgrid — and help usher in a new era of biological breakthroughs, rocket science and advanced models of scientific phenomena.

Mac Synergy

Xgrid turns a group of Macs into a supercomputer, so they can work on problems greater than each individually could solve. You can let Xgrid operate in screensaver mode, so whenever you aren’t working, your Mac can crunch away at some data set. Or if you have a group of Macs dedicated to the task, Xgrid makes it easy to set up a cluster that works around the clock, every day of the year.

Power to the People

Without any extra effort, you can increase the power of special Xgrid-enabled applications simply by adding more Macs to the cluster. You can also easily assist with community cycle-sharing projects like Charles Parnot’s Xgrid@Stanford research into heart health. Developers can tap into the new Xgrid Foundation APIs and Xgrid on Mac OS X Server to quickly add Xgrid functionality to their own programs. Many scientists who already use command-line tools in their work can immediately take advantage of Xgrid and have the power of a cluster without any extra effort at all.

Supercomputers Made Easy

Xgrid takes care of the hard work of configuring a cluster. It uses zero configuration Bonjour to connect available resources on a local network, DNS service lookup if your organization supports directory services, or even a hard-wired hostname if you are running Xgrid over the Internet. An easy-to-use System Preference panel lets you control how your machine gets used by the network and also tells the cluster which computer can send problems to the group for number crunching. Xgrid takes the grunt work out of splitting jobs and collecting results. You can even submit your job from a laptop, fly off to a vacation or conference, then reconnect and retrieve the results when you return.