Tony’s Supercomputer Cluster/Photoshop CS3
I got my first taste of using all of our household computers as one, five-processor supercomputer. I suspect that it won’t be my last. I also suspect that YOU’LL be able to harness all of that idle horsepower in your building too, once the new Photoshop ships.
If you are using OS X 10.4 Tiger, there is a wonderful, built-in option that nobody uses except for big universities. If you pull down the blue Apple menu, and go to System preferences, and then click on “Sharing”, there is an “Xgrid” option. Don’t turn it on or anything, because there’s not much point, so far. I just wanted to point it out.
I finally found a way to get some practical use out of it myself, though - It works very well indeed. I have a zillion movie files stored all over the place, and the majority of them are NOT Video iPod-compatible. I just downloaded and purchased VisualHub, which allows you to use every Mac in the building to do the hard work of converting movies to another format.
I have every existing episode of the TV series LOST (without commercials), and I wanted to be able to watch them on a video iPod. I did the conversion once, using my MacBook Pro, and the process took around fifteen hours. Then, I decided to take advantage of Visualhub’s Xgrid option. It couldn’t be simpler to set up, and sure enough, a test run showed that conversion happened more than twice as quickly (I’m guesstimating, by the way).
The MacBook upstairs and my own MacBook Pro were cranking away hard, with fans blasting. I had included my son’s G4 iBook in the mix, but it didn’t help much, just as I had been warned in the VisualHub manual. Non-G5 PowerPC Macs are just not fast enough to help very much.
I don’t expect to do a lot of this sort of work, but I can see a glimmer of excitement for all of those folks with networks of Macs running Adobe products.
PREDICTING THE FUTURE
I can see this topic becoming VERY important to folks using Photoshop, once everybody has shifted to Intel Macs (and a faster network). I have cursed Adobe for a year now, for refusing to come out with an Intel-optimized version of its products. What’s the use of all of that lovely, high-end hardware if you can’t get decent speed out of it? By the way… if you are running Photoshop CS2 on an Intel Mac, make SURE that you are running the 10.4.8 update. Apple evidently put a lot of Photoshop-specific speedups into that version of the operating system.
Based on preliminary reports, Photoshop CS3 beta is able to make use of ALL of the processors that you might have available. This is triple-groovy, folks. Up to this point, every program worth mentioning has behaved in the same, old, worn-out way when confronted with multiple processors. One program can’t get much use out of more than two processors. In fact, those experimental eight-processor Mac Pro towers that folks are playing with aren’t much faster than a four-processor Mac Pro when used in the real world (as opposed to pie-in-the-sky benchmark programs). Up to now, real-world software runs out of steam long before the hardware does.
The missing piece is “multithreading”. I hear that it’s hard work to write a program that makes full use out of all available processors simultaneously, but the benefits are huge. For whatever reason, the folks at Adobe made the decision to concentrate ALL of their efforts on re-writing everything from the ground up. The long-term benefits will be really incredible… for Adobe, for Apple’s sales of big, expensive Macs, and for the folks who use Photoshop as a money-pump for their business.
I will be in San Francisco January 8-12, 2007 for Macworld Expo. I FULLY EXPECT to be able to mess around with Photoshop CS3 on a new, eight–processor Mac tower that I expect Apple to announce that weekend. I also predict that Creative Suite CS3 will eventually support Xgrid, which will be even simpler to use once OS X 10.5 (Leopard) comes out. I’m basing this on the fact that the numbers of processors are going up, and once a program is written to take advantage of multithreading, then it’s staggeringly obvious that more processors are better, and why not use the secretary’s idle iMac down the hall to help with the heavy lifting during lunch, or overnight?
