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Racking Mac Pros

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Re: Racking Mac Pros

#91

Post by gohrt »

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 excels at human-facing industrial design and software user experience.

Neither of these are relevant in a rack-mounted environment with heavily customer-written backend/batch software with no user interface

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#92

Post by chiph »

skuhn wrote: post #71
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 ter…

What's the noise level like with these machines? The typical pizza-box servers aren't exactly quiet.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#93

Post by theandrewbailey »

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.

I was bothered by the extreme depth of field in images next to the text.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#94

Post by skuhn »

windsurfer wrote: post #42

Is there a summary somewhere that explains what makes "OS X’s graphics frameworks" worth going to all this trouble?

We haven't done any in-depth technical articles yet, and there's the worry of giving away our secret sauce, but it is something that I'd like to explore more in the future.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#95

Post by skuhn »

Pfiffer wrote: post #15

Some previous discussion here about using OS X, mounting Mac Minis, etc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8138791

Thanks for posting this. This is the second article in the series (although it took forever to finalize).

We're also working on a third, which I think will be in the format of an interview with the Mac Pro chassis's designer.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#96

Post by josu »

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…

You have to look at it as an entry barrier that protects them against competitors too. If they are the only ones offering this setup, they can charge very high prices and recover the initial investment relativelly quickly.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#97

Post by sanjeetsuhag »

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…

From the site :

"Building on OS X technologies means we’re dependent on Apple hardware for this part of the service, but we aren’t necessarily limited to Mac Minis. Apple’s redesigned Mac Pro seemed like an ideal replacement, as long as we could reliably operate it in a datacenter environment."

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#98

Post by skuhn »

msandford wrote: post #83
skuhn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was one of our initial ideas for the design, but it boiled down to an airflow concern. There are some products that do this, such as http://www.h-sq.com/products/mprack/index.html If you look at how the airflow works on that shelf, I think you'll see why I don't have confidence in that solution. The air paths to each system seem to be based on wishful thinking. We also didn't need to go that dense after consider…

That product you linked to isn't all that bad, provided that you run with a front plate to actually block off the rest of the cold isle and force the air to flow to the hot isle. But that doesn't seem to be included anywhere. So I agree that it's wishful thinking. The reality of the power budget makes the most sense really. There's no point in cramming extra units in if you're going to have to rewire for them. System…

H-Squared's product isn't terrible by any means, but I see it as phase 1 of at least a 2 or 3 phase solution. If you were running one shelf of Pros in a rack, it wouldn't matter much -- but at 10 racks of 88 Pros each, you'll run into cooling issues unless you put more work into it.

On the topic of density: our chassis was originally specced to support 6 units rather than 4. I vetoed that because it would require a second top-of-rack switch, and would have been too power dense for our current site design.

44 turned out to be the magic number this time around. The design is also flexible enough that if the specification changes dramatically in future Mac Pros, we can tweak as necessary to achieve ideal density.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#99

Post by jfb »

intrasight wrote: post #17

It is hard not to think that a great deal of time an money would have been saved by removing those "Parts of our technology are built using OS X’s graphics frameworks, which offer high quality output and excellent performance."

The video and imaging pipeline on OS X is light years beyond anything you could roll yourself in a reasonable timeframe. It's really good stuff.

Re: Racking Mac Pros

#100

Post by zorpner »

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)…

There used to be a ton of 3rd-party solutions for racking Apple products. Marathon Computer made a number of them, including replacement top brackets for a G3-style system: http://www.macobserver.com/news/99/june/990610/marathoncompu...

I used to have a tape measure from Marathon that was marked out in U, but I haven't seen it in years. They were a pretty cool company at the time.

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