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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#231

Post by joshmn »

skuhn wrote: post #230
joshmn wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the legal risk just isn't worth it.

It'd be interesting to see someone rip apart a Mac Pro and build an entire form-factor around its setup.

Don't get me wrong, what you guys have done is extremely beautiful in all ways, but I can't help to think that if someone wanted to do this with say a Mini... say you take a 1u rack, drill some new holes into it... hmm.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#232

Post by wtallis »

KeytarHero wrote: post #148
tinco wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> any generic desktop computer Any generic desktop computer with the same hardware. It sounds like they're using Apple's image pipeline, which I imagine would be designed around the specific graphics hardware in the Mac Pro. Sure it could work on other hardware, but when you know exactly the hardware you're running on you can do a lot of low-level optimizations you couldn't otherwise do.

Apple supports Intel, AMD, and NVidia GPUs. Their graphics pipeline has over the years supported substantially all of the graphics chips produced by those vendors in the past 10-15 years. Their current full feature set may only be supported on GPUs that admit an OpenCL implementation, but that's still every bit as broad as the generic desktop computer GPU market—about two microarchitecture per vendor. Apple's not getting any optimization benefits from a narrow pool of hardware, for GPUs or anything else. The only benefit they get along the lines of narrow hardware support is that they don't have to deal with all the various motherboard firmware bugs from dozens of OEMs.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#233

Post by 7Z7 »

wnevets wrote: post #146
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.

which hardware is "Apple"?

The small subset of third party hardware that they ship, and optimise for?

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#234

Post by skuhn »

joshmn wrote: post #231
skuhn wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, the legal risk just isn't worth it. It'd be interesting to see someone rip apart a Mac Pro and build an entire form-factor around its setup. Don't get me wrong, what you guys have done is extremely beautiful in all ways, but I can't help to think that if someone wanted to do this with say a Mini... say you take a 1u rack, drill some new holes into it... hmm.

The Minis are incredibly simple machines inside, and their airflow is not great. You could pop their logic boards out and run them without the chassis. With some thought it wouldn't be too tough to significantly improve their airflow for this environment.

I do have an existing rack design that holds 64 of them (and other people have gone denser, with operational compromises I prefer not to make), so there's no great impetus on my side to rip them out of their enclosures.

My Mac Mini rack design is shown in a little more detail in our previous article: http://photos.imgix.com/building-a-graphics-card-for-the-int...

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#235

Post by Gracana »

I'm really impressed by the quality of engineers on this forum. It's amazing, it seems that just about everyone here knows how to do skuhn's job better than he does!

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#236

Post by tbob22 »

grecy wrote: post #207
xaduha wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have you ever personally run a Hackintosh, full-time for a prolonged period of time? I did. But now I'm running Yosemite under KVM, VT-d motherboard, dedicated videocard and USB3 hub. You can get to a point where "it just works".

> You can get to a point where "it just works". For months and months on end of heavy usage without a single restart or issue? EDIT: to expand a little - I was developing/compiling all day long on my ~2008 MBP with it plugged into an external monitor, network, mouse, kb. I'd close the lid and walk home with it, then watch movies, torrent, develop some more, surf etc. Close lid, and repeat for months on end. The only…

That is your experience. A properly set up Hackintosh (with a custom DSDT and the proper kexts as needed) can be as reliable as a genuine Mac.

Regarding Windows machines, I've had desktops that would be used for months at a time (mostly rendering) without a restart and never crash.

A pretty good way to test for reliability is to let Prime95 and Memtest86 run for a week or so and see if it fails somewhere along the line (obviously proper cooling is a must), many consumer machines will fail this test.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#237

Post by jallmann »

s73v3r wrote: post #222
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/clou…

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

That is something that no one outside of Apple can say for certain. It doesn't even have to be a major change, but something like rearranging ports, adjusting taper or extrusions on the chassis, etc. Those kinds of adjustments happen all the time on consumer hardware, and most people don't notice, but may be an issue if you're trying to fit into precision machined slots.

> Hardware will almost always cost less than engineers.

For commodity, off-the-shelf hardware, absolutely. This is anything but, and still requires engineering effort to design, fabricate and assemble. And it's not always about the immediate dollars: sometimes a fundamental reworking means sacrificing short-term savings in favor of the long-term: flexibility, risk mitigation, reduced operational complexity, and cost over successive generations of hardware.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#238

Post by skuhn »

jallmann wrote: post #237
s73v3r wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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/clou…

> Given recent history, that's not going to be for a number of years. That is something that no one outside of Apple can say for certain. It doesn't even have to be a major change, but something like rearranging ports, adjusting taper or extrusions on the chassis, etc. Those kinds of adjustments happen all the time on consumer hardware, and most people don't notice, but may be an issue if you're trying to fit into pr…

There are definitely risks, but I do want to gently re-iterate that we're not blind to them.

About the only thing that Apple could do that would render this chassis obsolete is to substantially change the exterior dimensions of the Mac Pro. Obviously if it's a different shape, we would have to adjust things.

If they kept the same shape but modified it somehow, the only dimensional change that would be truly tough to accommodate is an increase to circumference. This is the dimension with the least wiggle room built-in, and it would cause some headache. We would probably have to sacrifice some density by removing 1 chassis from the rack.

Otherwise, changes to ports or minor adjustments to the length of the chassis can all be accommodated for in this chassis design.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#239

Post by [deleted] »

JonathonW wrote: post #126
sajal83 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not unassemble the cylinders and re-assemble into rectangle chasis? Im sure that would give you a more dense layout.. Sure it would void warranty and resale value.. but do you really care?

The whole machine's custom built to fit inside the cylindrical case... the best you could do would be to take the outer case off, and then you've just got a slightly smaller cylinder. Electrically, everything's built around a round "central" PCB using a custom interconnect. You're not going to be able to reassemble the thing into a rectangle and still get a functioning machine (not without tons of custom design work,…

[deleted]

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#240

Post by jallmann »

skuhn wrote: post #238
jallmann wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given recent history, that's not going to be for a number of years. That is something that no one outside of Apple can say for certain. It doesn't even have to be a major change, but something like rearranging ports, adjusting taper or extrusions on the chassis, etc. Those kinds of adjustments happen all the time on consumer hardware, and most people don't notice, but may be an issue if you're trying to fit into pr…

There are definitely risks, but I do want to gently re-iterate that we're not blind to them. About the only thing that Apple could do that would render this chassis obsolete is to substantially change the exterior dimensions of the Mac Pro. Obviously if it's a different shape, we would have to adjust things. If they kept the same shape but modified it somehow, the only dimensional change that would be truly tough to…

> There are definitely risks, but I do want to gently re-iterate that we're not blind to them.

Yep, I was just responding to the assertion that it wasn't a risk.

For what it's worth, it does sound like you've thought this through really carefully, and thanks for taking the time to explain so thoroughly and respond to everyone.

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