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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#191

Post by listic »

ilzmastr wrote: post #31

Wow, learn something new everyday. I thought everyone who did image processing and cared about performance used NVidia cards for the CUDA libraries. I never knew apple [GPU image libraries]( https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Graphi... ) made AMD a competitive choice. It is much more expensive, though a lot less engineering work, than buying some used Tesla's on ebay: http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html…

How come these used Tesla's are so cheap? (e.g. $150 for an M2090) http://www.ebay.com/itm/NVIDIA-Tesla-M2090-6GB-GDDR5-PCIe-x1...

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#192

Post by grecy »

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…

> there is no way that you can't build a hackintosh

Have you ever personally run a Hackintosh, full-time for a prolonged period of time?

It's anecdotal, but I can assure that once you're used to how OS X and the Apple hardware work together and never, ever, ever crash, using a Hackintosh is an exercise in frustration.

I had one of the known-best Hackintosh configurations in existence, and it didn't hold a candle to the MBP I had prior to it in terms of "it just works".

Sure, it was cheaper.

Guess what I did when that Hackintosh needed replacing? I walked in and dropped the coin on genuine Apple hardware without a second thought. I have never regretted it, and I'll never go back.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#193

Post by skuhn »

scott_s wrote: post #180
skuhn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was something that I struggled with while writing the article -- you don't want to introduce your solution as "well, this sucks in various ways, but keep reading...". It does boil down to viewing things pragmatically though. The Macs present challenges, but by our math, they're worth it relative to the cost of doing something else and the benefits they provide. And we actually run a lot of them in production, so I…

You do want to introduce your solution with "this has problems A, B and C, but we went with it because of X, Y and Z." It becomes much more interesting, because you're explaining not just your solution, but the problem space. Just the solution is usually less interesting than why the solution, even with its downsides, solves your problem. By the way, thanks for clearly, completely and patiently responding to people i…

Agreed, I didn't want to sugar coat things either. I think there is a bit of time given over to the downsides, but finding the right balance is tricky, and perhaps I erred by focusing too strongly on the "this is awesome!" side of things.

I want to explore the design decisions around the chassis in a follow-up, and we have one interview in the can already with the industrial designer. Hopefully that article will be a little faster to get out; this one was written about 3 months ago.

The other angle that I'd love to explore in a more in-depth article is how we actually do this stuff in production, and what we've learned about it. This would delve more into the ugly OS X stuff that we painted over to get things nice and pretty in production.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#194

Post by Alupis »

skuhn wrote: post #160
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…

This is correct, and a huge impetus for our use of Apple hardware. We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.

> We simply cannot risk our business on saving some money at the expense of violating Apple's EULA.

I believe people are questioning that Apple hardware/software is a requirement of your business (and that it's not "some money", but a lot of money you'd be saving).

It's difficult to fathom Apple hardware/software being a hard requirement to operate any business (as-in you can't operate without it). Both Windows and Linux have a plethora of image utilities, audio, etc...

Sure, OSX might have some optimized image processing stuff, but couldn't the massive savings be used to scale wider with more generic hardware and still come out ahead?

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#195

Post by skuhn »

justinph wrote: post #74

The mechanics of this are pretty neat. But the photography in the article is incredibly distracting. Does every shot have to be at an off-kilter angle? If this is a story about engineering, how about some head-on shots of the engineered thing. I get that the Mac Pro is a beautiful object, but this isn't about the mac. It's about the rack, and none of these photos let me understand it in one shot.

We added another wider shot of the chassis, but here are two others that didn't go in to hopefully give you a better sense of how the chassis actually looks:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/6jwqwxsu50zvhrw/_1090440.jpg?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/n7rej2uusmg2a3w/_1110402.jpg?dl=0

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#196

Post by skuhn »

CarVac wrote: post #181
jfb wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A lot of the complexity comes down to not just doing the operation, but doing it correctly and quickly. ImageMagick does multiple passes, for instance; this is sub-optimal for both quality and speed.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#197

Post by TD-Linux »

ranrub wrote: post #185
Geee wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:...

That one looks extremely close to the imagemagick one, slightly less aliasing and slighly more blur - it's down to a matter of preference.

Most importantly, it doesn't have the horrible box window that the imgix resampler has.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#198

Post by SeoxyS »

TD-Linux wrote: post #168
smackfu wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume 99% of users are using downsampling, to get thumbnails.

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…

Warning: clicking on the 3rd link in your comment repeatably crashes Chrome (the entire browser, not just the tab) for me.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#199

Post by alextgordon »

CPLX wrote: post #21

Would it really have killed Apple to keep on making rack mountable OS X servers? I bought and configured quite a few of them back in the day and was quite fond of them. I realize it's not the Apple Way™ but considering just how bizarre and niche the current trash-can Mac Pro line is, it hardly seems more niche than that.

Apple doesn't even make standalone desktops anymore. The Mac Mini 2014 is twice as slow as the Mac Mini 2012!

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#200

Post by ska »

skuhn wrote: post #188
ska wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That matches what I found, looking at this a while ago. Not perfect for every application, of course.
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