Building computational grids with apple's Xgrid middleware

Apple's release of the Xgrid framework for distributed computing introduces a new technology solution for loosely coupled distributed computation. In this paper systematically describe, compare and evaluate the Apple native Xgrid solution and a range of third party components which can be substituted for the native versions. This description and evaluation is grounded in practical experience of deploying a small scale, internationally distributed, heterogenous computational infrastructure based on the Xgrid framework.