Apple World Wide Developer Conference 2008

Usually a site of industry-changing events, Apple's Developer Conference brings hardware and software developers and vendors together to learn the latest plans from Apple for their burgeoning platforms and exposes its attendees to the latest technology from Apple and from other developers. This conference was notable as being the first WWDC to be "Sold Out".

At WWDC 2008, held at Moscone West in San Francisco, California, USA, in June 2008, Dauger Research presents:

For more about Apple's 1998 publication on our clustering project:

In 1998, at the UCLA Plasma Physics group, we invented the Mac cluster to achieve accessible computational power for our research goals. On the Macintosh platform, we developed the earliest tools to build easy-to-use numerically-intensive parallel computing clusters.

From the beginning, our patented software technology supports the Message-Passing Interface, today a dominant industry standard.  We used Mac OS 8's AppleTalk to discover computing nodes across the network and support supercomputing-style communications on the Mac cluster. Using plasma physics calculations we use for research, we demonstrated performance on our 8-node Mac G3 cluster similar to that of 8 nodes of a Cray T3E.

Prompted by Mac OS X's introduction, in 2001 we introduced the first OS X cluster solution with the Pooch App debut, reincarnating Mac clustering with IP-based communication and network discovery. Development of Mac clusters continues, adapting to all six major versions of OS X, multiprocessing, Xserves, the G5, Bonjour-based node discovery, the Intel transition, seven MPI implementations, and multicore.

We apply our clustering approach to mainstream applications. We accelerate Wolfram Research's Mathematica by combining it with the programming paradigm of today's supercomputers. Our Mac cluster approach accelerates QuickTime video compression, particularly frame-reordering H.264, plugging into mainstream desktop video-editing applications such as Final Cut Pro. On a single 8-core Mac Pro, our solution exceeds Apple's multicore implementation by 300%, plus the ability to further increase performance with additional Macs. We are excited by the benefits clustering can bring mainstream computing.

The year 2008 marks the tenth anniversary of Mac clustering. We find that the reliability of cluster technology is as important as its performance. By "reinventing" the cluster computer, we provide a unique solution designed to maximize accessibility and usability for users.