By LinuxHPC.org and Cluster Resources
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In computers, Xgrid is software developed by Apple's Advanced Computation Group that allows a group of networked computers to engage in distributed computing. The purpose of Xgrid is to offer scientists an easy-to-implement method of exploiting previously underused computational power at a low cost: it acts as a job scheduler, distributing jobs to be executed on available computers.
Implementation
With the inclusion of the Xgrid agent in Tiger, Apple increased its potential usage greatly: however, their decision to provide a graphical controller interface only to Mac OS X Server machines has limited the efforts by the computer community to embrace the platform. Those that have succeeded in spite of this include Xgrid@Stanford and BLAST.
Despite the lack of a graphical controller interface in the standard (non-server) Mac OS X distribution, it is possible to set up an Xgrid controller via the command line tools xgridctl, and xgrid. Instructions can be obtained through their respective man pages (e.g. in the terminal, type: man xgridctl).
All text used in this article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Xgrid".