http://www.macresearch.org/computing_grid_in_a_box_with_an_8_core_mac_pro

Of course an 8-core Mac Pro is nice for “mine is bigger than yours” taunts, however if you’re going to spend the money to buy a machine with 8-cores and 16 GB of RAM you better figure out how you are going to use all that horsepower. In a previous article I demonstrated how to use R + LAM/MPI to turn an 8-core Mac Pro (a personal machine I’ve dubbed the MacZilla) into a statistics supercomputer. In an effort to further justify the purchase of the MacZilla to the PI of our lab, I experimented with turning an 8-core Mac Pro into an all-in-one computing grid. To accomplish this I employed the VMWare Fusion virtualization software and Sun Grid Engine. I chose VMWare Fusion over Parallels since VMWare Fusion can fully utilize 16GB of RAM and plays very nice with 64-bit Operating Systems.

Very cool, check out this article, it’s an interesting post about grid using a Mac Pro.  Interestingly, one of the thoughts I’d had within the grid space was about VMWare and for example DataSynapse.

Could I take that DL585 (or the equivalent), with my virtual sessions on it, (then this is where I’ll need to explain myself), put DataSynapse grid service on the ESX server and each of the virtual instances. Is this more efficient than putting it on a DL580G2 with Windows/Linux?

Probably not, but am I not getting more efficient use of the infrastructure? - You could argue I suppose that the amount of processing that each instance could do is limited, or that you’re paying a high price for it - I suppose it’s one of those things best thought off in concept and not practice.