Pooch cluster app supports Leopard's Open MPI
updated 11:55 pm EDT, Tue April 29, 2008
Pooch 1.7.6 uses Open MPI
Dauger Research has released version 1.7.6 of Pooch (Parallel OperatiOn and Control Heuristic application) and Pooch Pro clustering software. The clustering technology now taps Open MPI, an open-source MPI implementation found Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" and formed through a partnership between academia, research, and the industry. Pooch merges a modern graphical user interface with supercomputer-compatible parallel computing. Version 1.7.6 connects to Open MPI built into Leopard via a pair of software modules, enabling Pooch to communicate with Open MPI so its daemons can launch the MPI application. Pooch can then identify and track Open MPI's execution, which is only available in the latest Mac OS X 10.5; it is the seventh MPI implementation Pooch supports.
In addition, the company says the new version of Pooch has adjusted to several infrastructure updates in Leopard, including long file, application, and directory names and Leopard's new Terminal.
The Pooch software leverages Bonjour automated network discovery for automatic node configuration, supports multicore by treating each core as a "virtual node", including individual cores of Intel's CPUs, and launches parallelized Universal Applications onto a cluster.
The new Pooch also ships with the new v1.3 of the Pooch QuickTime Exporter.
Pooch v1.7.6 is available for $175 for the first compute node (and $125 for each node thereafter), the Pro version is available for $200 for the first compute node ($150 for each node thereafter). Pooch requires networked Macs running Mac OS X 10.2 or later, Mac OS X Server 10.2 or later, and/or Mac OS 9, while the Open MPI features require Mac OS X 10.5 or Server 10.5 or later.
