Originally Posted by
GadgetFreak
Now Im curious. I was thinking of getting a fairly beefy system for personal use, mainly for photo editing. I like Aperture and will get Photoshop soon enough. I would prefer a Mac (due to aperture) but was thinking of getting a Macbook Pro which is pretty pricey for a loaded one. Maybe I should go with multiple minis? How well can you make a cluster type arrangement out of them? Thanks.
I'm using them independently... But you
can cluster macs. All macs include Xgrid software which allows you to share the processors. While Xgrid does work quite well, there are some drawbacks. First the setup can be a little tricky. Secondly, the applications need to support Xgrid and I'm not sure if Aperture does...but it may. Finally to get great performance you'd have to make some other significant investments like a faster hard drive for the minis, a gigabit lan setup...
In the end, I think you'd spend more for 2 or 3 minis and the setup than you would for a decked out MBP or MacPro... Its actually a very good question. I've used Xgrid to help transcode video files and it does help a lot, so it really might be worth pursuing!