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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#281

Post by skuhn »

Kephael wrote: post #268
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

How long will it take to amortize the costs of the hardware based on EC2 g2.xlarge savings?

Not certain if I understand your question, but I'll take a shot at answering:

I expect a useful life span for any datacenter equipment of 3 years. A Mac Pros list price is about $4000. We pay less but I'll use public figures throughout. Using equipment leasing, I can pay that $4000 over the 3 year period, with let's say a 5% interest rate and no residual value (to keep this simple). So over 3 years, I spend $4315 in total per machine to get 2200 gflop/s.

Over 3 years with EC2, a g2.xlarge is $7410 up front (to secure a 57% discount) for 2300 gflop/s.

So I can pay over time, save $3100 over a 3 year period, and probably still resell the Mac Pro for $500 at the end of its life span. That's pretty compelling math to me. There are costs involved with building and operating a datacenter, and that evens things out a bit. What really kills EC2 though is the network bandwidth costs. It is just insane.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#282

Post by PebblesHD »

robotresearcher wrote: post #264
x0054 wrote: post #254

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…

They sold Xserve rack mounted macs for many years. They stopped doing it, presumably because the market was not worth their attention.

I feel quite lucky to have got a few before they stopped selling them. I have three dual-cpu xServes still running as our main app servers and they've been some of the most reliable boxes we have.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#283

Post by LukeShu »

Heads-up: Using the default Iceweasel (Debian's Firefox) User-Agent, the content of the article doesn't show up. If I switch to a Firefox User-Agent, it does.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#284

Post by pholz »

This seems like an odd choice to me.

I think OS X has been the best all-round Desktop OS for many years now, but what does it give you as a server that a linux-based system can't, and that's worth the trouble of custom racks, vendor lock-in and high costs?

In fact, if you're working with OpenGL, OS X can be frustrating since it only ever supports an OpenGL version a few years behind the latest release - IMO one of the platform's biggest drawbacks.

Then again, I've seen some pretty strange errors on server machines doing GPU-heavy work on linux machines with Nvidia cards, and it's probably easier to get support on a standardised SW/HW system such as the Mac Pro...

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#285

Post by acqq »

It's deep in the comments and I really like the sentence:

x0054: "You are fitting triangular shaped computers, wrapped into round cases, into square shaped boxes."

And place them horizontally. And without additional fans!

And surprisingly, if you read skuhn's answers here, for them it all still has sense, financially.

And also surprisingly, Apple says it's OK to use the Mac Pros horizontally:

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201379

Fascinating.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#286

Post by skuhn »

LukeShu wrote: post #283

Heads-up: Using the default Iceweasel (Debian's Firefox) User-Agent, the content of the article doesn't show up. If I switch to a Firefox User-Agent, it does.

Thanks, the article is hosted by Exposure (one of our awesome customers), so I'll pass this note along to them.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#287

Post by [deleted] »

skuhn wrote: post #166
listic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand "related to cooling" as Mac Pro's cooling in this setup is 5-10x more efficient.

Sorry, just some off-the-cuff math. We use Supermicro FatTwin systems for Linux stuff, and they run a lot of fans at much higher RPMs to maintain proper airflow relative to the Mac Pro design (which runs one fan at pretty low RPMs most of the time). As a result, I'm calculating that the Mac Pros draw a lot less power for cooling purposes than the Linux systems due to their chassis design. However, serviceability and…

[deleted]

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#288

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #287
skuhn wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, just some off-the-cuff math. We use Supermicro FatTwin systems for Linux stuff, and they run a lot of fans at much higher RPMs to maintain proper airflow relative to the Mac Pro design (which runs one fan at pretty low RPMs most of the time). As a result, I'm calculating that the Mac Pros draw a lot less power for cooling purposes than the Linux systems due to their chassis design. However, serviceability and…

[deleted]

[deleted]

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#289

Post by kubov »

smeyer wrote: post #6
salibhai wrote: post #4

Isnt this ridiculously expensive? Couldn't you achieve the same thing using cheaper PCs?

>Couldn't you achieve the same thing using cheaper PCs? They say "Parts of our technology are built using OS X’s graphics frameworks, which offer high quality output and excellent performance". So they couldn't achieve the "same thing" in the sense of running their software on racked computers, because it won't run on PCs, and if you're thinking about expense you'd have to consider the cost of making the software run…

I'm really curious about any study/compassion between OS X's graphics frameworks vs other open/closed source solutions available. How 'output quality' is measured?
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