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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#251

Post by tcdent »

tbob22 wrote: post #236
grecy wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

You sound pretty confident in it, so here's a question from a perspective more relevant to the discussion:

Would you found a company and make your primary product hackintosh servers? Are you willing to stand behind your 'perfect' configuration and give those customers years of support?

These guys are running a real startup. A vendor with that exact promise and a failed delivery could tank them.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#252

Post by skuhn »

frugalmail wrote: post #250
ansible wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2x FirePro D500 gflop/s: 3500 That 3500 gflop/s for the D700? It is instead 2200 for the D500. http://www.amd.com/en-gb/solutions/workstations/d-series 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. The 6GB VRAM version with the D700 costs another $600 USD each. The K80 has 12GB VRAM per GPU (24GB total per card). If your…

> it will be cheaper to rewrite the software for the render pipeline. You don't even have to rewrite it, Linux imagemagick + OpenCV can handle the use cases of cropping and sizing trivially. They can keep the rest of the code (device mappings and CDN related I guess) unless that was implemented using ObjectiveC (this is another thing that I would think is crazy)

Cropping and sizing are just two (common) operations that imgix can perform. There's a lot of other stuff as well: http://www.imgix.com/docs/reference

Not to say that it's totally impossible to do these types of operations on ImageMagick, but it wouldn't work nearly as well as our current solution does. ImageMagick is a shockingly awful tool for use in server-land for a variety of reasons, some of which are handled better in GraphicsMagick. IM was the bane of my existence at more than one previous company.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#253

Post by frugalmail »

MCRed wrote: post #247
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…

Why pay 5-10X as much to host on AWS? It's not for free. Hosts have a really nice markup, compared to hosting yourself. Hosts make a lot of sense for small companies who can benefit from the aggregated demand and capital costs being spread over many clients.... but not when you're at the level of building your own datacenter, or even using a full rack. It's funny how since 1980 people have been talking negatively abo…

>Why pay 5-10X as much to host on AWS?

You have no idea what the comparison is, and I don't either. But again, the criticisim is around running a business off of a bunch of Apple "trash cans".

>advocating vendor lockin to windows.

Linux is no lockin, Windows lockin via software vs. Apple for hardware and software.

>"vendor lockin" to that platform

Java, Scala,or any other JVM language protects from that, and to a lesser degree Python, PHP does as well.

>There is little risk being "locked in" to the largest most successful company in the world.

Price gauging? Deciding not to support your platform anymore? Forcing you to upgrade?

>Build on Linux and you're locked into just Linux, unless you port.

Only that there are a bunch of Linux options to choose from, they are all open source so you can do whatever you want as far as upgrade paths and support, and if you use the JVM languages this isn't an issue.

>in fact I think one Mac Pro probably replaces 4 or 5 Linux boxes doing this.

There is no fact there, that's your delusional opinion.

>If you think Optimized OpenGL shaders would do this, you're not understanding what it is that they are doing. You're just assuming it's a trivial problem, it is not.

It's a CDN + image manipulation tool, you don't need 3D libraries. And if you use exiting libraries or tools, it is quite trivial. Here is their API: http://www.imgix.com/docs/reference

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#254

Post by x0054 »

skuhn wrote: post #246
x0054 wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that OS X is a solid server platform. Linux is always a more flexible choice, but if OS X works for you, it works for you. That being said, is sticking cylindrical mac pros on their side into square racks really the best solution. There are 2 problems I see with this design: 1: You are placing the Mac Pros on their side, which may lead to premature bearing failure on the main cooling fan. Apple designed…

1. That's certainly a possibility, and one that we won't really have hard numbers on for some time to come. However, the fan is about a $60 part, so provided that we don't have coordinated, catastrophic failures and that they live for at least a year, we're doing alright. Do note that Apple specifically says that the Mac Pro may be operated on its side. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201379 2. True, but 1U per ser…

Fascinating, I had no idea Apple approves using the Mac Pros on their side. It would be interesting to find out what happens with the fans.

It's also fascinating that they are running Linux internally nowadays, for their server side stuff. What next, I find out that all of the Microsoft data centers run Debian :) Considering that they employ all of those Objective-C and Swift engineers, you would thing that they would want to leverage their workforce write Obj-C or Swift backend code as well. For most backend tasks either Swift or Obj-C is as good of a language as any other.

Any way, rackable OS X systems are a missed opportunity for Apple. They can sell them to a company like yours, movie production houses, and even design some libraries and make a play for the web app market with Swift. Not sure how successful the last one would be. As for the economies of scale, they don't even need to manufacture or design the system, take an off the shelf rack mount server from another manufacturer, fiddle around with the casing a bit to give it that Apple feel, and load OSX on it. Perhaps the margins in the server side hardware are way too slim.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#255

Post by hornetblack »

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…

Although this depends on the country. If Apple says that you can't run your Mac Pro on Thursday, it would probably break some Australia Consumer Law.

Although the "Only run on Apple Hardware" would probably be fine.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#256

Post by rbanffy »

MCRed wrote: post #245
blkhp19 wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hackintoshes would make a lot more sense.

No, they wouldn't. Look at the current state of Mackintoshes. People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software. OS X moves pretty fast, possibly faster than Linux, and Apple builds it to support Mac hardware.... the teams who are porting hackintosh code have to support a lot more hardware variety and they have less resources than, say, linux. Running mackintoshes in…

> People are having kernel panics and struggling to keep their machines running with current software.

Not here. My Mac is at about 11 days of uptime and it's under constant use. At this moment, I can't say it's less reliable then my Linux machines.

In this specific case, however, I'd consider ditching the enclosure and ducting cold air through the internal chassis/heatsink. A Macpro is, essentially a heatsink with boards mounted on it and I'd just let the chassis do that part.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#257

Post by tbob22 »

tcdent wrote: post #251
tbob22 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 li…

You sound pretty confident in it, so here's a question from a perspective more relevant to the discussion: Would you found a company and make your primary product hackintosh servers? Are you willing to stand behind your 'perfect' configuration and give those customers years of support? These guys are running a real startup. A vendor with that exact promise and a failed delivery could tank them.

Currently, no.

1. Apples EULA does not allow OSX on non-apple hardware. 2. Some major updates can break customizations and require some modifications (bootloaders, etc) to be re-installed

I have no problem helping a friend set up a Hackintosh when they want to save a few thousand dollars (I have set up a few already) with the understanding that they need to backup before doing any system updates and expect things to break after updating.

While Hackintosh's work well for personal use as long as you are somewhat techy and pick the hardware carefully, (putting aside the EULA issue) it does not make sense for anything large scale.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#258

Post by teacup50 »

skuhn wrote: post #190
frugalmail wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The choice isn't between a Mac Pro and EC2. You can rack up x86 boxes chock full of GPUs far more easily than Mac Pros.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#259

Post by qnaal »

Gracana wrote: post #235

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!

I think the big picture is that this looks like a joke, and everyone's having fun trying to articulate their feelings about it.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#260

Post by skuhn »

teacup50 wrote: post #258
skuhn wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The choice isn't between a Mac Pro and EC2. You can rack up x86 boxes chock full of GPUs far more easily than Mac Pros.

I mention it because AFAIK, all of imgix's direct competitors run in EC2.
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