[Beowulf] Joe Blaylock's notes on running a MacOS cluster, Nov. 2007

[Tim Cutts]

On 21 Nov 2007, at 3:00 pm, Robert G. Brown wrote:

> On Wed, 21 Nov 2007, Tim Cutts wrote:
>
>> I have to say I have some sympathy with that view.  Much though I  
>> love OS X as a desktop OS, I have to wonder why anyone would jump  
>> through hoops building a cluster running just Darwin, when they  
>> could probably have done it much more easily, and with much more  
>> community support, if they used Linux... It just seems like a lot  
>> of extra pain and difficulty for no tangible benefit.
>
> And at premium prices for the hardware.  Apple's OS is constrained,  
> as I
> understand it, to run only on Apple hardware.

While that's true of OS X, it is not true of Darwin, AFAIK.  I believe  
you can run Darwin on pretty much any PC hardware.

> One day Apple will make up its mind about whether it is a hardware
> company or a software company.  I vote soft, and thought that once  
> they
> supported generic Intel even their main company management would "get
> it".

It didn't work for Mac OS X's previous incarnation, though, in the  
form of NextSTEP, did it?  Selling that platform as an OS and  
abandoning hardware manufacture did not save NeXT.

And with open source operating systems not far behind in many  
respects, I don't know how much future there really is in basing a  
business on operating system software unless, as in Microsoft's case,  
you already have an effective monopoly.

Tim


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