Hardware manual

Chapter 1 Mac OS X Server in Action 25
 One Xserve in a rack is usually set up as a master computer, called the head node. The
head node runs NetBoot and Network Install and hosts directory services and other
shared facilities for other computers in the rack, which are used for data processing
and numerical computations.
 The head node is also likely to be set up as an AFP and NFS file server and
implement an IP firewall that protects access to the cluster by unauthorized users.
 The head node can also be set up as an Xgrid cluster controller. Xgrid computational
service lets you achieve supercomputer performance levels by distributing
computations over collections of dedicated or shared computers. The Xgrid cluster
controller provides centralized access to the distributed computing pool, referred to
as a computational cluster.
 Scientists, videographers, and other application users work at Mac OS X computers to
remotely configure and monitor applications and databases residing on the Xserve
computers.
 Mac OS X Server offers scientists and researchers familiar UNIX utilities, shells,
scripting languages, and compilers for building specialized software. A full suite of
developer tools comes with Mac OS X Server, including the gcc command-line
compiler and a development environment called Xcode Tools.
You can write, compile, and debug using C, C++, Objective-C, or Java. Xcode Tools
can be used to port command-line applications to Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server or
to enhance them with a Mac OS X user interface.
 An administrator computer, such as an iBook running Mac OS X Server administrative
applications, can be used to manage the entire network.