261–270 of 331 posts
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…
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(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote the article) I've alluded to this elsewhere, but the math doesn't add up to your gut reaction. It's cheaper, but not by a significant enough margin relative to the engineering costs, to go with commodity servers and GPUs. Building things out of sheet metal is actually easier than migrating to Linux, for one big reason: we can pay someone else to do it, because it isn'…
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…
Why would you assume that? There are a ton of things that linux does better than OS X - and it would be extremely stupid for any company regardless of size to not use the right tool for the job. For example, even IBM uses, sells, and supports Linux instead of AIX or OS/360 on their line of servers and mainframes. I think that your assumption is just really old fashioned.
Internally Apple does use Linux, just as Microsoft uses a blend of OS's - supporting Linux on Azure, for example. I read that they actually use Linux as a host for their Hadoop service on Azure.
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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 woul…
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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 woul…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 woul…
And I don't believe that they only started using unix operating systems not their own "nowadays" - when OS X was too immature during development and its long maturation what did you think they were using?
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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 woul…
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> 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
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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…
What other companies utilize Apple hardware in this way at this kind of scale? While not "out of this world" in comparison to some of the big players who have tackled scaling, it's definitely significant considering Apple hardware.
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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…
A guy I work with has been running several heavily used hackintosh servers without issue. They have been very reliable and he's happily converted existing Linux servers to hackintosh. He's been doing this for a while and knows exactly what hardware to use.