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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#181

Post by CarVac »

jfb wrote: post #99
intrasight wrote: post #17

It is hard not to think that a great deal of time an money would have been saved by removing those "Parts of our technology are built using OS X’s graphics frameworks, which offer high quality output and excellent performance."

The video and imaging pipeline on OS X is light years beyond anything you could roll yourself in a reasonable timeframe. It's really good stuff.

I imagine more advanced things like face recognition and such are not so simple, but from my experience writing a raw converter, a lot of image processing is far simpler than you'd expect.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#182

Post by tinco »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #127
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…

Depends on where you live. At least in Germany (and I think the whole EU), EULAs are meaningless.

The lawyer I spoke to was Dutch. There is some unclarity about EULA's sold to consumers, I think the general idea of the consumer protection is that the consumer should have seen the EULA before they paid for the product.

That said, it says on the box that the software is only for Apple hardware, and I think even only as an upgrade for an existing OSX install.

If you're a company, then EULAs are definitely binding, no matter where you are.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#183

Post by hinkley »

skuhn wrote: post #105
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…

The Tesla K80 didn't exist when I started this project, but to do some quick math: K80 gflop/s: 8740 2x FirePro D500 gflop/s: 3500 K80 runs about $4900 a card, whereas the entire Mac Pro (list price) is $4000. So it's 2.5x the performance at easily 2x the cost if not more. You're right that there is a cost advantage to going with commodity server hardware, but I don't think it's as great as most people think in this…

Most of the armchair folks on these threads haven't internalized Fred Brooks, especially regarding diminishing returns as the team size grows.

You as the server guy hiring a couple people to figure out how to squeeze another 10% value out of the system by hacking hardware is not fungible with hiring two more devs to try to avoid racking custom hardware. As if two devs could pull that feat off anyway.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#185

Post by ranrub »

Geee wrote: post #177
TD-Linux wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CHROME ON MAC USERS: Use the imgur links instead of the 0x0 links, some users seem to be reporting crashes related to TLS. The downsampling also isn't that great. Original image: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/haasn/cms/master/rings_lg_... Downsampled with imgix: http://chen.imgix.net/rings_lg_orig.png?w=400 Downsampled with imagemagick: https://0x0.st/1-.png http://i.imgur.com/Nvl7tAm.png Downsampled with imagema…

Opening the 0x0.st image crashes Chrome on Mac. Just Googling 0x0.st causes whole browser to crash!

What about this downsampler? I think it's a bit better http://res.cloudinary.com/rancloud2/image/fetch/w_400/https:...

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#186

Post by ska »

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…

re your hackintosh idea: I have no idea what the current state of play is, but I looked at this in some detail when they came out - and there was no way you could build a directly comparable machine without spending very similar money. The GPUs would just kill you, far more than any other components.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#187

Post by skuhn »

SG- wrote: post #145
frugalmail wrote: post #133

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

1) They did a cost analysis and it was alright, I can't imagine high-end servers with dual GPUs being much cheaper or much more expensive myself. 2) This isn't the 90s where Apple was at risk of folding and going away. 3) They actually don't other than phones. Go back to all their Pro desktop lines starting with the PowerMacs. The previous MacPro case lasted quite long and came from the PowerMac G5.

The longevity of the previous Mac Pro form factor definitely gives me hope, although one can never be sure when it comes to Apple.

Consider Mac Rumor's lifespan of the various Mac Pro models: http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac_Pro

The previous form factor (silver tower) lived from August 2006 to December 2013. If we see that kind of longevity out of the black cylinder form factor, I'd be thrilled (although preferably with more internal updates). However, there's nothing stopping us from adapting our design to whatever new models come out.

We have current rack designs for Mac Minis and Mac Pros now, and we can add a third if the need arises.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#188

Post by skuhn »

ska wrote: post #186
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…

re your hackintosh idea: I have no idea what the current state of play is, but I looked at this in some detail when they came out - and there was no way you could build a directly comparable machine without spending very similar money. The GPUs would just kill you, far more than any other components.

The GPUs in the Mac Pro are significantly more cost effective per gflop than the equivalent AMD Fire Pro server models.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#189

Post by tajen »

tinco wrote: post #113
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…

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…

> you'll be in violation if you run it on a Thursday

Indeed, there is a JS library opensourced by Microsoft to decode Excel files, named xlsx.js. In the license, it is written... that it cannot run on another OS than Windows. It means even though it's Javascript, the page hosting it cannot be viewed on a Mac or Linux.

Long story short, Stuart Knightley created a clean room implementation named js-xlsx to do the same thing, without the lawyer string attached.

https://github.com/stephen-hardy/xlsx.js/issues/8

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#190

Post by skuhn »

frugalmail wrote: post #138
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…

> 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?

The real question to me is: why would anyone fund doing this in EC2?

Here's the quick math on cost per gflop, including all network and datacenter costs:

  Mac Pro: $5/gflop
  EC2 g2.xlarge: $21.19/gflop
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