21–30 of 331 posts
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.
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."
Building on OSX seems like it must add a ton of complexity to your workflow, despite getting access to some of Apple's GPU-optimized image code. Then again, it's often cheaper to throw silicon at problems than people. If you have in-house expertise in Apple's graphics libraries, that might be cheaper than hiring someone who could write the whole thing to run under a lower-cost Linux solution. Alternatively, OS X migh…
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…
If you don't have OS X in the cloud, then you're going to have to write your own raw image converter, and that means you can't sync with the OS X client native raw converter, complicating the workflow...
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…
The Mac Pro isn't a great value in the datacenter space. It's a single socket server that's limited to 64 GB of RAM. It's not unusual anymore to throw GPUs in rack mount systems; most of them already have the PCIe bandwidth necessary to support 4 big GPUs so it's often just a matter of getting the right riser cards. Compare a Mac Pro to an HP DL360 that can hold 4 8-core Xeons (32 cores total) and over 200GB of RAM a…
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…
The Mac Pro isn't a great value in the datacenter space. It's a single socket server that's limited to 64 GB of RAM. It's not unusual anymore to throw GPUs in rack mount systems; most of them already have the PCIe bandwidth necessary to support 4 big GPUs so it's often just a matter of getting the right riser cards. Compare a Mac Pro to an HP DL360 that can hold 4 8-core Xeons (32 cores total) and over 200GB of RAM a…
Also, if you're trying to sync raw images between OS X clients and the cloud, then you're going to need OS X servers in the cloud.
It'll greatly complicate the clients workflow if they can't use their built in raw converters.
A Mac Pro is 9.9 inches tall and 6.6 inches in diameter. 9.9 / 1.75 = 5.65 and 6.6 / 1.75 = 3.77 https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/specs/
Building on OSX seems like it must add a ton of complexity to your workflow, despite getting access to some of Apple's GPU-optimized image code. Then again, it's often cheaper to throw silicon at problems than people. If you have in-house expertise in Apple's graphics libraries, that might be cheaper than hiring someone who could write the whole thing to run under a lower-cost Linux solution. Alternatively, OS X migh…
From a pure hardware perspective, I would love to move this part of the service to Linux systems with GPUs. I spent some time evaluating this before we committed to the Mac Pro solution -- built some prototype hardware and did a cost analysis. It just wasn't the right move, because of the engineering cost for us. OS X's graphics pipeline is really strong, and we've built a lot of cool things with it. There is no analog whatsoever on Linux -- we would have to commit a lot of resources to re-build what we already have, and it would in the best scenario not be a customer-visible change. As a lean startup, we have to be ruthless with the work do: if it doesn't move the needle for our customers, it's probably not the right thing to do right now.
So instead, I've spent some time (and engaged with partners like Racklive) to get the Mac Pros to be as operationally acceptable as possible. This rack design and the chassis we designed go a long way towards achieving that goal. Airflow is taken care of, and the rack hits my power quota almost exactly (at full load). Cabling and networking and host layout follow our patterns from our conventional server racks. USB and HDMI ports on the front allow me to easily use a crash cart.
The lack of IPMI is my biggest operational headache. We have individual power outlet control and can install the OS over the network, so that's something at least.
The OS itself is also challenging. I'm not a fan of launchd. Finding legitimate information about how to do something on OS X is pretty tough, given that most of the discussions are focused around desktop users (who may be prone to pass on theories of how things work rather than facts). We've gotten it to a point where things work pretty well -- we disable a lot of services, run our apps out of circus, use the same config management system as on Linux, and so forth. We treat the Macs as individual worker units, so they're basically a GPU connected to a network card from the perspective of our stack.
I'm sure they've performed some kind of market analysis for this, but there's enough differences between OSX and Linux solutions that for people who use HPC solutions (a growing market) a cleaner path from OSX to HPC would be very helpful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Mac Pro isn't a great value in the datacenter space. It's a single socket server that's limited to 64 GB of RAM. It's not unusual anymore to throw GPUs in rack mount systems; most of them already have the PCIe bandwidth necessary to support 4 big GPUs so it's often just a matter of getting the right riser cards. Compare a Mac Pro to an HP DL360 that can hold 4 8-core Xeons (32 cores total) and over 200GB of RAM a…
OS X does not have NUMA. It has some nice libraries for multi-threading, but that doesn't really matter that much when you're saturating your memory bus because the CPUs are doing too many cross-zone memory requests.