Hey, are you ready for a dramatic deflection into profoundly dissimilar subject matter? After yammering on about Mac-based supercomputer clusters for two entire scenes, we're going to shift gears into the entirely different and wholly unrelated subject of Mac-based parallel and distributed computing-- so buckle up, because the transition is going to be really jarring! If you don't strap yourself down to something heavy, you're sure to be thrown clear!

Oh, wait... We just noticed that Mac-based supercomputer clusters and Mac-based parallel and distributed computing are actually almost completely the exact same thing. The only difference is that while you're probably not likely to blow $5 million on an 1,100-node supercomputer for your basement, if you're a serious geek (in the nicest possible sense, of course) you might want to parcel out a single big rendering job or something over a half-dozen idle Macs in your lab-- the principle's the same, though. So never mind about that "strap yourself down" thing (unless you were planning to do it anyway). Gee, apparently here at AtAT, it's not just Columbus Day-- it's also All-Distributed Computing Day! (What, no iCards?)

So here's the skinny: faithful viewer David Triska pointed out that Think Secret has a quick blurb on something called Xgrid, which is apparently going to be an Apple tool for-- all together, now-- "parallel and distributed high performance computing." No, Apple hasn't announced any such product yet, but before your inner skeptic dares to pooh-pooh the notion, we should probably mention that Think Secret's source is pretty compelling: it's Apple's own public web site. The company posted a sign-up form for a new mailing list called "xgrid-users," which is, stunningly enough, for "discussions on using Xgrid." Go figure.

There's no telling whether this is another web lackey slip-up like the Great Power Mac G5 Specs Leak or just a low-key-and-no-big-deal intentional announcement on Apple's part, but we suspect the latter, because at broadcast time, the form was still up. (Given that Xgrid clearly isn't targeted at the average Mac user, it isn't exactly Expo Stevenote "One More Thing" fare, so there isn't much point in keeping it a crazy-big secret.) At this point, any details about Xgrid are wild speculation, but the name implies that it might plug into Panther's Xcode developer tools to allow tinkerers to build their own distributed applications. Or maybe it'll be optimized for flocks of Xserves so companies like Pixar can pick up a few truckloads of cluster nodes and get a render farm up and running in no time flat.

Who knows? We're just glad that the list sign-up page mentions the focus on parallel and distributed computing, because otherwise we'd have assumed that Xgrid was a G5-optimized port of Minesweeper. Or maybe Tic-Tac-Toe.