Xgrid - History

History

Xgrid's original concept can be traced back to Zilla.app, found in the OPENSTEP operating system API, created by NeXT in the late 1980s. Zilla was the first distributed computing program released on an end-user operating system and which used the idle screen-saver motif, a design feature found in widely used projects such as Seti@Home and Distributed.net. Zilla won the national ComputerWorld Smithsonian Award (Science Category) in 1991 for ease of use and good design. Apple acquired Zilla, along with the rest of NeXT, in 1997 and later used Zilla as inspiration for Xgrid. The first beta version of Xgrid was released in January 2004.

Several organizations have adopted Xgrid in large international computing networks. One example of an Xgrid cluster is MacResearch's OpenMacGrid, where scientists can request access to large amounts of processing power to run tasks related to their research. Another was the now defunct Xgrid@Stanford project, which used a range of computers on the Stanford University campus and around the world to perform biochemical research.

In a pre-release promotional piece, MacWorld cited Xgrid among the Unix features in "10 Things to Know about TIGER", calling it "handy if you work with huge amounts of experimental data or render complex animations". After Xgrid's introduction in 2004, InfoWorld noted that it was a "'preview' grade technology" which would directly benefit from the Xserve G5's launch later that year. InfoWorld commentator Ephraim Schwartz also predicted that Xgrid was an opening move in Apple's entry into the enterprise computing market.

Apple discontinued Xgrid with OS X v10.8 (Mountain Lion), along with dependant services such as Podcast Producer.