For the MP Tube rackmount skeptics…

[Walter Soyka]

[John Heagy] “True, but blades aren’t know for their GPU power which a render/encode farm could take advantage of.”

GPU technology is still pretty new here. Many renderers are still largely CPU based.

I don’t have any personal experience with this, but I’d guess GPU-based farms are still denser in purpose-built racked systems. 10″ x 7″ x 7″ is a lot of space for just two GPUs.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[John Chay]

That’s my concern. We need easy access to the cable ports. Since the ports are on the side of the body, the only way to mount these things is by standing them up. If they’re laying down and once you start stacking, you’ll have no access to the computers that are in the center of the rack.

[Aindreas Gallagher]

but almost who cares? – that thing might as well be geordi laforge’s computer?

I kind of find that I somewhat deeply love apple for having created that thing. I mean look at it.
the specs are bananas and you can near shove it into a shoulder bag?

immense little monster.

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Craig Seeman]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “you can near shove it into a shoulder bag”

For me (and I suspect many) that may be more important than rack mount. Previously one might be limited to a laptop on the road when one really would prefer something more powerful. Granted one has to find a way to slog a monitor but for some jobs, the idea of walking in with Xeon and two GPUs is pretty major.

[Ricardo Marty]

Somebody will design a patchboard and will work it out.

Ricardo

[Aindreas Gallagher]

you would have to think there are likely a large number of scenarios where a lunatic mac pro that appears out of a 2014 crumplr bag ready to drive 4K off multiple screens (how big are those screens? are they measured in feet? stadium screening baby.) – would be amenable.

depending on the scenario – the client provisioning a cheap monitor is a doddle right?
And a coffee-pot sized 4K driver xeon workstation, with your assets, appears out of the shoulder bag to plug in to it?

come on – what?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Mark Dobson]

[Charlie Austin] “”270 Mac Pro servers per POD in only 12 square feet of Datacenter floor space.””

So how do you access the I/O ports on this wine rack collection of MacPro’c ? How are they powered and is this not just a bit of joke? Why keep the machines in their covers.

Pressurised Pod environment?

And can I have one please.

[Dan Stewart]

I guess they’re daisy chained/routed with Ethernet or maybe they connect to 6 other nodes via TB? Would that be an advantage under any conditions? Maybe Cray could make us an interconnect..

[Walter Soyka]

[Dan Stewart] “I guess they’re daisy chained/routed with Ethernet or maybe they connect to 6 other nodes via TB? Would that be an advantage under any conditions?”

The article says gigabit Ethernet.

Craig will be delighted to tell you about IP over Thunderbolt. It’ll surely be fast, but only Apple has it at the moment.

It might be a good solution for very small ad hoc clusters, but it won’t fly for larger installations unless someone develops a managed Thunderbolt switch. That looks unlikely since switching ASICs are expensive [link], InfiniBand already has good penetration in this space, and Ethernet has economies of scale.

[Dan Stewart] “Maybe Cray could make us an interconnect..”

As a Thunderbolt peripheral, with a cool-looking, horse-shoe metal case and a wall wart power adapter? 🙂

Cray sold their interconnect business to Intel last year.

The stack of Macs in the article isn’t being built as a cluster. They’re individual dedicated servers for hosting or for colocation. I think there’s relatively little value in a Mac cluster at this point — there’s no compelling software to run and you can design denser systems with other hardware.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Bernard Newnham]

I was reading PCPro magazine the other day. An article about networked server farms was so far away from your average computer chat that I had no idea what the man was saying. It’s a whole different world, and a long way down its own – mostly Linux and virtual machines – path. I can’t see them popping back to an odd shaped machine unless there were very very powerful reasons.

Bernie