Truth be told, we didn't really exhaust all of the Apple announcements yesterday; there was one that was a little sneaky-- well, at least as sneaky as anything can be that has its own press release. Steve omitted it completely from his keynote, most likely because he didn't relish the thought of saddling an already less-exciting-than-usual agenda with a subject that sends the less-geeky 99% of the planet to sleep faster than a Sominex-and-NyQuil smoothie. We speak, of course, of parallel computational clustering.

...Hello? Hey, WAKE UP!

C'mon, it's not that dull. You guys all got a charge out of Virginia Tech building the third-fastest supercomputer in existence out of Macs, right? Of course, the only reason you found that exciting was because you couldn't stop drooling at the thought of 1,100 dual-2.0 GHz Power Mac G5s all lined up to do your bidding, but still, fundamentally we're talking about stringing a bunch of Macs together so they can all cooperate on one set of tasks. The good news (or bad news, if you were looking for an ironclad excuse to blow $5.2 million on Mac hardware) is that you really don't need a thousand-plus top-of-the-line Power Macs to pull that off; all you need are a handful of Mac OS X systems networked together and software that lets them do the cluster thingy. Enter Xgrid.

Some of you may remember Xgrid back when it mysteriously surfaced as the subject for a new Apple discussion list last October. Despite the fact that Apple hadn't actually announced any such technology, lots of people joined the list and participated in spirited discussions questioning how they were supposed to stay on-topic ("discussions on using Xgrid") when no such product yet existed; Apple pulled the list down a little while later without so much as an "oops, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" for anyone's trouble. Now, though, Xgrid is public knowledge, and Apple previewed the technology yesterday. The geekiest 1% of the world's population cheered loudly. And nerdily.

Simply put (because if we go into any more detail, we're going to fall asleep), Xgrid allows "scientists and others working in computer intensive environments" to build software that can use Apple's Rendezvous auto-discovery technology to find idle Xgrid-enabled Macs on the network and harness their power to share in the number-crunching. Can't afford to build a top-three supercomputer? No worries-- even your school's three Mac labs will make for a nice crunch-farm after hours, letting you make the most of what's on hand. And sure, if you're not one of said "scientists or others," that may not sound like much right now, but eventually wouldn't it be kind of cool if your G5 could automatically snag CPU cycles from your PowerBook two rooms over and your kid's eMac to speed up the MPEG encoding on that iDVD project you're trying to burn?

Besides, it comes with a neato tachometer to show you how much Xgrid power is available on your network. See? It is fun for the non-nerdlings! Vroom, vroom!