I bought a mac-mini for fun and recreation and stumbled upon their XGrid configuration settings. The idea crossed my mind to use the spare cycles for data-mining, but as of now the system is just connected to a TV and is a glorified gaming and fun system for the family room. Anyone have any thoughts on XGrid, its utility, and whether this is something worth investigating?
Well, in my opinion, it depends on the interface you want to use it with. I found that for the few times I want to use parallelism in extreme, booting up EC2 with Ruby and DRb was cheaper than buying a whole bunch of mac-minis. On the other hand, if it is something frequent and you have a good interface (like rxgrid), then yeah, it can be awesome.
I've used it before for data mining in the Netflix competition. IMO it's more of a hassle to set up than its worth. You're better off using Hadoop if you really want to use your cycles to perform crazy computations.