There’s a new Pooch on the loose, as well as two more new products of interest to Mac developers and programmers.
Dauger Research is shipping a new version (1.2) of Pooch, the Parallel Operation and Control Heuristic application. The latest update introduces support for multiple implementations of MPI and executables written in a wide array of programming environments, according to MacTech magazine .
It now comes with three distinct MPI implementations: MacMPI_X (the message-passing interface for Mac clusters); mpich (an open-source MPI commonly used on Linux-based clusters); and MPI-Pro (an MPI commercially supported by MPI Software Technology). You can run all three with your parallel code and Pooch on Mac OS X.
Pooch is designed to combine numerically-intensive, parallel-computing clusters with the Mac’s ease of use. It provides the user interface for the latest incarnation of AppleSeed, a project begun by physics researchers at UCLA in 1998. Plus, Pooch can now sniff out and launch the latest executable types available on Mac OS 9 and X. This provides users with a wide choice of programming environments and APIs (application programming interfaces), including Carbon, Cocoa, Classic, Unix-based Mach-O, Unix shell scripts and AppleScripts.
The new version of Pooch introduces additional new features, such as folder-structure copies, Unix-permission recognition, complete Unix-style process monitoring and management, recent node and file list recall and self-scheduling node registration.
Pooch 1.2 is available until April 30 at its original price structure: US$150 for the first computer node, then $100 for each node thereafter. Pooch requires networked Macs running Mac OS 9 with CarbonLib 1.2 or later, or Mac OS X 10.1 or later with 4MB of available RAM and 2MB of disk space.
For a demo version, full documentation, a discussion mailing list devoted to parallel computing, information about compiling and running your code with the MPI implementations, and more, visit the Dauger Research Web site.
In other news, Philippe Mougin has released F-Script 1.2 for Mac OS X. F-Script is an open-source interactive and scripting environment. Version 1.2 adds support for the Mac OS X distributed object system, a completion mechanism, an experimental graphical Key-Value browser, and more.
F-Script is based on Smalltalk syntax and concepts. But rather than using Smalltalk’s object model and frameworks, it uses the Cocoa object model and Cocoa frameworks. F-Script provides interactive and scripting access to Cocoa objects, according to MacTech.
F-Script is free. The open source software is available for download.
Also, PariahWare has released T.O.M.M. 1.0 for Mac OS X, the traditional Mac operating system and Windows.
T.O.M.M. (TacOps Map Manager) parses your TacOps cache file and lets you move your downloaded maps, textures, etc., into permanent locations so that they don’t need to be downloaded again. The product, made with the REALbasic environment from Real Software, is free.
Finally, Monkeybread Software of Germany has released version 2.4 of their REALbasic Plugin Collection, which adds around 500 functions, methods and classes to REALbasic. It’s now available for download.