[Kryton]

This is something that I've had running around my head for years and please tell me if I'm being silly.

A long time ago. Long before FireWire appeared physically on Macs and Cards I read an overview article about what it would offer us in the future.

Everything was pretty straightforward apart from one thing that struck me and I've been too unsure to mention anywhere.

The author mentioned that according to the 'then' plans for firewire it might be possible at a future date to distribute processing power via FireWire to other processors on the bus. However the author also made it perfectly clear that a) the processors would have to be designed with this in mind and b) it would require software that only Apple could write to make it happen.

Of course, at the time Apple wasn't even taking multiple processors very seriously and the OS was a closed shop.

However, now we have the G4, which is a very multiprocessor friendly design and Darwin, some of the guts of OS X.

Would it be possible to add processors via FireWire and have them automatically recognised by the system (if some good soul were able to patch this into Darwin). I'm imagining the equivalent of some of today's upgrade cards mounted in plastic cases (just like hubs) with two firewire ports on them.

People would then be able to create processor farms and take them wherever they wanted and just plug them in. You could use your old chip until it died.

The reason I haven't mentioned this before is because I thought it was impossible due to memory requirements. I thought that each processor would have to have its own on board memory and that this would not be feasible.

But would it be possible to have a central bank ie in the computer for those external processors to use?

I can't remember where I read the article but it was printed (not on the web) around 96/97. I thought it was MacWorld but can't find the article anywhere to verify this.

I'm thinking about rendering needs and stuff that can easily be put on a 'back burner' for the processors to chug away on while the in-the-computer processor handles the rest of the OS.

Am I dreaming on this?

What you described sounds like clustering. This has been around for years as means of creating distributed servers. Each computer has a fast interconnect with other computers to share the processing load. This also helps with reliability by increasing redundancy.

Apple is in a good position for this now they are migrating to the Unix based OS X because clustering software exists under Unix already. Firewire might be a good candidate for a high speed connection though the gigabit Ethernet is another interesting thought.