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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#221

Post by skuhn »

Alupis wrote: post #194
skuhn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 L…

Not at the moment. The cost overhead to OS X is minimized by my approach to datacenter design and operation, and the benefit of OS X's image processing software stack is maximized by the imaging engineers on staff at imgix who are making the most of it.

The math may not work out this way forever, and when it doesn't, we'll make a change.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#222

Post by s73v3r »

jallmann wrote: post #78

This seems risky from a business perspective: it's voluntary vendor lock-in. What if Apple decides to change the Mac Pro form factor for the next iteration? Then you have to retool and are left with a bunch of incompatible chassis. What if Apple stagnates with hardware upgrades? You'd be stuck running obsolete hardware. What if Apple discontinues the entire Mac Pro line? Not to mention the price premium of Apple hard…

"What if Apple decides to change the Mac Pro form factor for the next iteration?"

Given recent history, that's not going to be for a number of years.

"What it says is they are willing to throw a ton of money and effort towards (very cool) custom hardware, but are unwilling to hire a person to write optimized OpenGL shaders for Linux, which would work on pretty much any other server they choose to build/buy/lease/cloudify."

Hardware will almost always cost less than engineers.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#223

Post by [deleted] »

notsony wrote: post #218
skuhn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple gave up on the server market. They don't care about number-crunching or scientific computing. To build a server-side based business around OS X doesn't make sense to me. Did you try writing your image processing code for Linux and CUDA / OpenCL? Is there anything specific about the OS X frameworks which means you can't develop a non-OS X solution?

[deleted]

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#224

Post by s73v3r »

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…

"but there is no way that you can't build a hackintosh 1U with dual cpus and multiple GPUs and not come out big money ahead."

Licensing costs, and legal costs when you get sued for violating the license?

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#225

Post by walshemj »

dinasaurusrex wrote: post #142
to3m wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was pretty much my thought as well. The results of this cost-benefit analysis make me raise my eyebrow, and, same as you, I can only assume that OS X permeates the infrastructure from top to bottom, to an extent that makes pulling it out too painful to even contemplate. Image processing shaders of this type aren't that hard to write. If you're worried about them not matching some piece of client software exactly…

(full disclosure: I work at imgix) Uploading pre-edited images takes time/resources, and in general a lot of our customers rely on us to do all of their image processing so that they don't have to. Additionally, creating edited versions of images in advance presents two problems: 1) Any future site redesigns or edits must now be applied en masse to the existing images or risk older images not complying with the new s…

Then why not have rackmount commodity mb based systems with dual xenon's stuffed with GPU's

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#226

Post by skuhn »

mozumder wrote: post #47
exelius wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right; which is why I was surprised that OS X stacks up as favorably as it does. But I wouldn't call it a great value since it's still much more expensive than a traditional rack mount setup. From a density perspective it's really not bad at all, which is a testament to how well-engineered the Mac Pro is.

I'd say it's not even as expensive as something like IBM's 4-socket rack servers like the x3850 X6.

In fairness, 4 socket servers are pretty serious money. Just the difference in cost for 4 socket capable Xeons alone puts them out of reach for many use cases.

  E5-2658 v2 (dual cpu): $1440 per part
  E5-4650 v2 (quad cpu): $3616 per part
As a result, I stick to 2 socket servers for Linux machines. I think the scaling out paradigm just works out a lot better, particularly for Internet services.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#227

Post by PStamatiou »

grecy wrote: post #192
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 t…

Agreed. I had a hackintosh for a year and something always freaking broke or it wouldn't boot up.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#228

Post by epistasis »

walshemj wrote: post #225
dinasaurusrex wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(full disclosure: I work at imgix) Uploading pre-edited images takes time/resources, and in general a lot of our customers rely on us to do all of their image processing so that they don't have to. Additionally, creating edited versions of images in advance presents two problems: 1) Any future site redesigns or edits must now be applied en masse to the existing images or risk older images not complying with the new s…

Then why not have rackmount commodity mb based systems with dual xenon's stuffed with GPU's

skuhn has been replying to this all over the comments. For example:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9501800

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#229

Post by skuhn »

listic wrote: post #191
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...

I theorize that it's because they're server grade equipment, and the used market for server gear is not that large. Most established businesses don't want to risk buying something that straight up doesn't work or will fail later, even at a 50-75% cost benefit. It just isn't worth the time spent dealing with it.

If you're a one person startup, then you do what you have to do to survive. Eventually you get to the point where free stuff actually costs you more than just paying for it in the first place.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#230

Post by skuhn »

joshmn wrote: post #219
blkhp19 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackintoshes would make a lot more sense.

Of course they would. Legally? Yeah, good luck. Edit: I think the more obvious answer to this is that they would rehouse these babies in a more convenient, albeit likely custom form-factor.

It is appealing in a way, but I also think it would put the business at legal risk in a way that is totally unconscionable. We cannot run a Hackintosh in production for a single moment, the long term ramifications could be immense.

The chassis we designed represents my attempt to re-house the Mac Pros in something more suitable for the datacenter.

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