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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#71

Post by skuhn »

kaolinite wrote: post #13

Three possible reasons I can think of for doing this over using PCs or Linux servers: 1. Using the same operating system as the developers of the software, plus access to Apple's fantastic imaging libraries. 2. The Mac Pro, whilst expensive, is good value for money. The dual graphics cards inside it are not cheap at all. As servers with GPUs are fairly niche, this might actually be a cheaper solution. 3. The form fac…

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article)

1. Yeah, the OS X graphics pipeline is at the heart of our desire to use Macs in production. It's also pretty sweet to be able to prototype features in Quartz Composer, and use this whole ecosystem of tools that straight up don't exist on Linux.

2. I mentioned this elsewhere already, but it is actually a pretty good value. The chassis itself is not a terrible expense, and it's totally passive. It really boils down to the fact that we want to use OS X, and the Mac Pros are the best value per gflop in Apple's lineup. They're also still a good value when compared against conventional servers with GPUs, although they do have some drawbacks.

3. I would love it if they weren't little cylinders, but they do seem to handle cooling quite well. The power draw related to cooling for this rack versus a rack of conventional servers is about 1-5/th to 1/10th as much.

In terms of provisioning, we're currently using OS X Server's NetRestore functionality to deploy the OS. It's on my to-do list to replicate this functionality on Linux, which should be possible. You can supposedly make ISC DHCPd behave like a BSDP server sufficiently to interoperate with the Mac's EFI loader.

We don't generally do software updates in-place, we just reinstall to a new image. However, we have occasionally upgraded OS X versions, which can be done with CLI utilities.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#72

Post by makeitsuckless »

skuhn wrote: post #64
bane wrote: post #29

It's really kind of mind-boggling that Apple makes and sells the Pro, which can be upgraded to a really nice high performance GPU workstation, but then doesn't sell the same hardware in rack mountable forms for clusterable computing. I'm sure they've performed some kind of market analysis for this, but there's enough differences between OSX and Linux solutions that for people who use HPC solutions (a growing market)…

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and wrote this post) It is pretty frustrating. We've joked around about how Apple will probably announce a new Xserve at WWDC next month, now that we've done the work to get the Pros happy in production. I don't really see them re-entering this space though. Apple already has a LOT of businesses that they are clearly bored with. iPods, the Thunderbolt Display, their mice, and so…

I think the problem isn't "unsexy", but service and scale.

Buyers of rackmounts require a totally different kind of service. It's not just about the iron, it's a largely separate operation from the consumer PC business. You don't exactly take your Xserve to the Genuis bar...

There simply isn't enough demand for Xserves to make it worth the investment for Apple. (As far as I remember, many companies that bought the original Xserves phased them out again because Apple couldn't deliver that kind of service.)

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#73

Post by bluedino »

lsllc wrote: post #40
bane wrote: post #29

It's really kind of mind-boggling that Apple makes and sells the Pro, which can be upgraded to a really nice high performance GPU workstation, but then doesn't sell the same hardware in rack mountable forms for clusterable computing. I'm sure they've performed some kind of market analysis for this, but there's enough differences between OSX and Linux solutions that for people who use HPC solutions (a growing market)…

Apple used to sell the rack mounted X-Serve, but discontinued that a few years go.

>> but discontinued that a few years go.

11 years ago.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#74

Post by justinph »

The mechanics of this are pretty neat. But the photography in the article is incredibly distracting. Does every shot have to be at an off-kilter angle? If this is a story about engineering, how about some head-on shots of the engineered thing.

I get that the Mac Pro is a beautiful object, but this isn't about the mac. It's about the rack, and none of these photos let me understand it in one shot.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#76

Post by exelius »

grecy wrote: post #68
cmurf wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunate for many who wish otherwise, it's very clearly a market they do not remotely care about.

I think the opposite is true. They made the Rack mountable xServe for almost a decade. The fact they discontinued it shows that it's clearly not a market - customers didn't want it in enough volume to justify the product.

It's not that there wasn't a market, it's that the Xserve wasn't sold in the way that companies that buy lots of rack mount gear handle procurement. If they certified specific configurations of commodity hardware for OS X and sold them through existing reseller channels as a new SKU, it would be much easier.

That said, there's probably not much of a market for it anymore since we've gone a few years without an OS X rack mount machine and people have found other solutions.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#77

Post by skuhn »

Sanddancer wrote: post #58
mozumder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, they're fitting 4 sockets and 8 GPUS in the space that's normally used by 4 sockets only. Also, if you're trying to sync raw images between OS X clients and the cloud, then you're going to need OS X servers in the cloud. It'll greatly complicate the clients workflow if they can't use their built in raw converters.

At the scale imgix is going for, and given they're already doing a lot of custom architecture work, something like Supermicro's GPGPU chassis [1] would allow the same server density, plus use GPUs and CPUs that are 1-2 generations ahead of Apple's offerings. Regarding raw images, you don't need OS X servers to do that, just programs that can read the raw formats. That could be a windows box, or an OpenCL-enabled prog…

(I'm the datacenter manager at imgix, and I wrote this article)

I mentioned this elsewhere, but considering alternative solutions was definitely a part of this project. Supermicro's GPGPU chassis was one of them, as well as some of the 2U FatTwin options (which we use for all of our other system types).

While it would probably have long term cost savings, it definitely isn't something that we could realize within deploying just a few systems. It would be a pretty time and labor intensive process on the software side, in order to save labor on the operations side that isn't particularly problematic for us. So, maybe in another few generations of our image renderers this will make sense, but it doesn't today.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#78

Post by jallmann »

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 hardware itself, then the time and expense incurred to design and fabricate this.

The fact that their software depends on Apple's graphics libraries doesn't seem like a good justification for doing this. 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. Certainly there will be other "debt" to overcome, especially if much of your codebase is non-portable Objective-C or GCD, but that has to be weighed against the possibility of your only vendor pulling the rug out from under you. And looking at Apple's history, that is a very real possibility...

Owning your hardware like this makes complete sense if your core business is directly tied to the platform itself, eg an iOS/OSX testing service. But as far as I can tell, imgix does image resizing and filters... their business is the software of image processing, and they're disowning that at the expense of making unrelated parts of the business more complicated. Not a good tradeoff, IMO.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#79

Post by skuhn »

justinph wrote: post #74

The mechanics of this are pretty neat. But the photography in the article is incredibly distracting. Does every shot have to be at an off-kilter angle? If this is a story about engineering, how about some head-on shots of the engineered thing. I get that the Mac Pro is a beautiful object, but this isn't about the mac. It's about the rack, and none of these photos let me understand it in one shot.

Do the two pictures at the very end, which are a profile and rear view of the rack, convey what you're looking for?
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