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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#131

Post by damon_c »

skuhn wrote: post #88
damon_c wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, I think. To me the interesting part about putting Mac Pros in a rack is integrating its relatively unusual approach to air flow. None of these pictures really show how that is accomplished here. In fact many of them seem to be deliberately hiding that specific aspect.

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article) I had originally intended there to be a totally disassembled chassis with an airflow overlay on top, but it turned into a lot of work. All of the chassis were already assembled by the time we took the pictures. The high level view is that air is drawn in to the vent on the front right, which has a separate channel that all 4 Pros sit in. They are sealed…

They're really nice pics and you did a great job explaining everything!

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#132

Post by elif »

rsync wrote: post #109

I have two conflicting responses to what I am seeing here ... First, this is awesome. Just like I want to live in a world where people are paying picodollars for cloud storage[1], I also want to live in a world where a bunch of mac pro cylinders are racked up in a datacenter. Very cool. Second, this is complete silliness. I'm not going to go down the rabbithole of flops per dollar, but there is no way that you can't…

I'm not trying to lure you down the flops per dollar rabbithole... but when i was researching the mac pro before purchasing, putting together a computer with GPUs providing the same flop performance was something like 80-90% of the cost of the mac pro. the D700's are really good. This is just an anecdote based on my memory, so take with a grain of salt, but the comparison is probably not as bad as you are imagining.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#133

Post by frugalmail »

This seems like a company destined to fail:

1) Massive premium for compute

2) They're at the mercy of Apple, a single completely unpredictable vendor.

3) Apple changes it's form-factors to the latest "design" way to frequently

4) Apple sucks to manage in mass

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#134

Post by TD-Linux »

Given all of the effort spent to use Quartz's graphics operations, I was curious as to how they actually performed. I opened an account and tried out the upsampling, and was a bit disappointed.

http://chen.imgix.net/rose.png?w=560

What other upsamplers look like: https://github.com/haasn/mpvhq-upscalers/blob/master/Rose.md

Looking at the other operations available, I fail to see what is done better by Quartz than just by imagemagick.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#135

Post by ansible »

exelius wrote: post #63
ansible wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting -- they actually manage to get greater density out of this setup than many traditional rack mount systems offer. If they are GPU limited... A full 4U rack of Mac Pros is 8 AMD Fire GPUs (6GB VRAM each), 256GB main RAM, 48 2.7GHz Xeon cores (using the 12-core option), and 4TB of SSD. 10G Ethernet via Thunderbolt2. Let's set aside differences in GPU and processor performance; we're just looking at t…

So for $56k USD you get a system that is roughly twice as fast as the 4x Mac Pro solution... but also costs twice as much? The numbers actually don't work out too badly. At least, better than I would have initially assumed. Density is really the only area where the 4x Mac Pro solution loses hands down.

There's also local storage. The SuperMicro box can host a lot more storage locally than the Mac Pros can do easily (you'd need external Thunderbolt2 drives), and it can make sense to run RAID-10 or something to get more speed.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#136

Post by tlrobinson »

rylee wrote: post #128
skuhn wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article) 1. Yeah, the OS X graphics pipeline is at the heart of our desire to use Macs in production. It's also pretty sweet to be able to prototype features in Quartz Composer, and use this whole ecosystem of tools that straight up don't exist on Linux. 2. I mentioned this elsewhere already, but it is actually a pretty good value. The chassis itself is not a ter…

What's so good about this OS X graphics pipeline that isn't on anything else? I'm now super curious.

Core Image:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Graphi...

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Image

I'm not super familiar with it or the competition, but I assume this is what they're talking about.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#137

Post by [deleted] »

tinco wrote: post #120
nulltype wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if that were not the case, I doubt the performance of the OS X image pipeline is tuned for non-Apple hardware if it supports it at all.

Non-Apple hardware does not differ in any meaningful way from Apple hardware. The performance of anything in OSX is perfectly tuned for any generic desktop computer. It also supports most hardware straight from the box.

[deleted]

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#138

Post by frugalmail »

skuhn wrote: post #71
kaolinite wrote: post #13

Three possible reasons I can think of for doing this over using PCs or Linux servers: 1. Using the same operating system as the developers of the software, plus access to Apple's fantastic imaging libraries. 2. The Mac Pro, whilst expensive, is good value for money. The dual graphics cards inside it are not cheap at all. As servers with GPUs are fairly niche, this might actually be a cheaper solution. 3. The form fac…

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article) 1. Yeah, the OS X graphics pipeline is at the heart of our desire to use Macs in production. It's also pretty sweet to be able to prototype features in Quartz Composer, and use this whole ecosystem of tools that straight up don't exist on Linux. 2. I mentioned this elsewhere already, but it is actually a pretty good value. The chassis itself is not a ter…

> It really boils down to the fact that we want to use OS X,

How the hell did you guys get funding to do this? I can't imagine any sane person wanting to put money behind this. Could I have their contact information?

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#139

Post by toomuchtodo »

pronoiac wrote: post #121
toomuchtodo wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In some cases, you have no choice. One project I worked on was where we needed to use proprietary software that only worked on OSX that would take a video, perform waveform analysis on the audio, and the output would be a properly timed closed captioned master with the text having been provided separately. This was of course a small project, and only had a few Mac Minis rack mounted for the task, but I can easily see…

Hey, I'd like to know more about your speech-to-text project, if you're willing to share.

The software product was called MacCaption (http://www.cpcweb.com/download/MacCaptionBetaVerInfo.htm).

A process would drop a video file and a text file in a directory, and then a script would execute the MacCaption binary for each file with a list of parameters to get the result we wanted. A captioned video file, as well as a WebVTT caption file, would be the results of the process. Those were then put into another workflow for dissemination.

Straightforward, although MacCaption was a terrible product to work with. They're owned by Telestream now (www.telestream.net/captioning/compare.htm).

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#140

Post by smackfu »

nulltype wrote: post #116
tinco wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, but running OSX on non-Apple hardware is a violation of its EULA. I have contacted a lawyer for this (I wanted to run Hackintosh in the office), the language is very clear. The author of the software has the full power to license its use to you with any restrictions they find necessary no matter how ridiculous. If Apple only sells you the license if you promise not to run it on a thursday, you'll be in vio…

Even if that were not the case, I doubt the performance of the OS X image pipeline is tuned for non-Apple hardware if it supports it at all.

The GPUs aren't made by Apple, and I assume that is what this code is using (because otherwise it's a huge waste of money.)
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