Apple have released a preview version of a new tool for “Advanced Computation” – Xgrid
This tool allows you to form a computation cluster from the Macs on your network. Nothing really new here, except that in typical Apple fashion it is easier to set up than any of the other computational clustering implementations I have seen.
It uses Apple’s Rendezvous technology to make the discovery of available computational clusters easy, and has a simple preferences pane in order to set it up.
At the moment it is a preview release but it is functional and comes with some demos including a Mandlebrot set calculation and the BLAST DNA application as well as an API to allow development of custom tasks.
While it is intended for scientific computation you can see how it could be used to distribute CPU intensive tasks such as video rendering in a home or office environment.
Once again Apple shows that innovation doesn’t mean adding a few new features to an office suite.