The problem with xgrid is that it is not ideal for realtime work, at least not how it's put together. Video people typically use large farms for non-realtime rendering. At least the work I've done has been like this, especially with 3D rendering.
Even with the audio implementations that exist now, like the Logic distributed audio, are very limited. Only working with their plugins, not all plugins.
For my own situation, I've been trying to off-load my VI's to another machine. Sure, it's not distributed processing, but it's at least another step at getting more out of my studio.
I used both MIDI over LAN, which worked okay, and Audio over LAN with Wormhole. This was less ideal for me, too much latency no matter what I did. Mostly because I only had a 100Mbit backbone setup.
My second iteration just hooked up audio and MIDI with interfaces. This worked well, the only problem was, loading up separate systems on the second machine was a pain. I used RAXX, and it didn't have a simple system for doing this. I had to load up the RAXX for each peformance. Not that this was horrible, but I'd rather have it automated.
Now enter KORE, from NI, coming out Monday. This fills that gap, so we'll see how my secondard machine works in this regard. That along with my UAD-1 is pretty much giving me all I need right now.
For what it's worth, real time distributed processing isn't that incredibly easy. My personal opinion is that it is related to the latency issues with the ETHERNET protocol (I think IEEE-802.11). You have no guaranteed timing mechanism in Ethernet, so you need it fast as possible, which is why I think people use 1Gigabit for this, which is really overkill.
I'd rather see something akin to mLAN. Something with dedicated interconnect between machines, because every little extra layer of connectivity that is latency prone, the more you waste due to making up for the inefficiency issues.
But those are my thoughts anyways
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