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High End Server Rumors?
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I distinctly remember seeing a renderman icon on the dock of one of the G5s at the WWDC unveiling....
(or was it before that when they were showing off Pixlet.. I'm not sure, I did see it though, sure of it... an icon with the title of 'renderman')
QCassidy352
macrumors G5
wouldn't theses create heavy competition for IBMs blade servers? why would they want to help apple cut in to their own server sales?
why doesn't...
Why doesn't Pixar use Power4 servers? Please don't hit me if the answer is obvious...I'm thinking cost...
Why doesn't Pixar use Power4 servers? Please don't hit me if the answer is obvious...I'm thinking cost...
Now I know what some guys meant with the 'Reality Distortion Field'. 😛
Finally a theory of Quantum Gravity will be found and tested with Apple hardware!
😀
Jaguar capable of 64 processors, too?
Macbidouille reprots that an Italian reader has managed to recompile the XNU kernel of Jaguar and gaining support for up to 64 processors. Very interesting though. Here´s hostinfo on that system:
"[hany@MacG4Dual ~] > hostinfo
Mach kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu Jul 17 20:45:52 CEST 2003; hany:BUILD/obj/RELEASE_PPC
Kernel configured for up to 64 processors.
2 processors are physically available.
Processor type: ppc7450 (PowerPC 7450)
Processors active: 0 1
Primary memory available: 512.00 megabytes.
Default processor set: 62 tasks, 198 threads, 2 processors
Load average: 0.00, Mach factor: 1.99"
http://www.macbidouille.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2003-07-18#6157
Macbidouille reprots that an Italian reader has managed to recompile the XNU kernel of Jaguar and gaining support for up to 64 processors. Very interesting though. Here´s hostinfo on that system:
"[hany@MacG4Dual ~] > hostinfo
Mach kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 6.6:
Thu Jul 17 20:45:52 CEST 2003; hany:BUILD/obj/RELEASE_PPC
Kernel configured for up to 64 processors.
2 processors are physically available.
Processor type: ppc7450 (PowerPC 7450)
Processors active: 0 1
Primary memory available: 512.00 megabytes.
Default processor set: 62 tasks, 198 threads, 2 processors
Load average: 0.00, Mach factor: 1.99"
http://www.macbidouille.com/niouzcontenu.php?date=2003-07-18#6157
it makes perfect sense! panther is compatible with up to 4 processors, panther server too (duh), xserves only go to 2 NOW, but the future xserves will utilize 4!
eric67
macrumors 6502
yes , except that most of the non-american people knows that LA is not the capital of US.........
At the end I will think that the canadian parlement representative who was saying "war is the only way for american to learn geography" is indeed partially right????????????????
Regarding the subject, from my profesional point of view, if it really exists I would not be surprized at all that biotech companies like Genentech and Amgen are currently testing the beast, G4-based computer were already faster than PIV for sequences comparisons.... but with a clustered G5 I just can not imagine how fast it will go.....
Why 970s?
Why on earth would Apple build a 64 proc 970 server? Why not use Power4's, or, more likely - as Apple tends not to launch a platform on an old product - Power 5's? This seems to make a whole lot of sense to me. Slap Altivec SIMD engines on 32 or 64 of those bad boys and be done with it. As the architecture would likely be built from scratch to support hundreds of GB's of RAM and would have to use massively complex system controllers, converting a Power5 to Apple's needs would be a relatively easy project. IBM would benefit from the 'testing' done on the chip (as they are mostly concerned with reliability) and Apple would benefit from the image of power and therefore gain industry respect and higher market share (their primary concern). It would be much like the current relationship the companies share with workstations and the 970, only with high end server chips driving high end servers. As the 970's ultra high SMP efficiency is likely due to each chip's independance (no more dual chip cards) it's ability to be effictively scaled to this level in a single machine is questionable. It would seem far more difficult and costly to slap 64 970's on 64 busses (and make it work) than using an existing highly scalable server platform. With each Power5 working four times faster than a Power4 (isn't that 7 or 8 times faster than a G5?), Apple would be in the league of UltraSPARCs and Zseries powerhouses with less effort and complications than stringing all those G5's together, and it would require no change in code from 970 aware programs. It would even be a great alternative for Xserves!
...And wouldn't it be nice to test a multi-threaded, dual core chip on an existing OS? Such an OS would have to support four processors to do so.
Why on earth would Apple build a 64 proc 970 server? Why not use Power4's, or, more likely - as Apple tends not to launch a platform on an old product - Power 5's? This seems to make a whole lot of sense to me. Slap Altivec SIMD engines on 32 or 64 of those bad boys and be done with it. As the architecture would likely be built from scratch to support hundreds of GB's of RAM and would have to use massively complex system controllers, converting a Power5 to Apple's needs would be a relatively easy project. IBM would benefit from the 'testing' done on the chip (as they are mostly concerned with reliability) and Apple would benefit from the image of power and therefore gain industry respect and higher market share (their primary concern). It would be much like the current relationship the companies share with workstations and the 970, only with high end server chips driving high end servers. As the 970's ultra high SMP efficiency is likely due to each chip's independance (no more dual chip cards) it's ability to be effictively scaled to this level in a single machine is questionable. It would seem far more difficult and costly to slap 64 970's on 64 busses (and make it work) than using an existing highly scalable server platform. With each Power5 working four times faster than a Power4 (isn't that 7 or 8 times faster than a G5?), Apple would be in the league of UltraSPARCs and Zseries powerhouses with less effort and complications than stringing all those G5's together, and it would require no change in code from 970 aware programs. It would even be a great alternative for Xserves!
...And wouldn't it be nice to test a multi-threaded, dual core chip on an existing OS? Such an OS would have to support four processors to do so.
Erm, Xserve is a blade. You cannot take up 'less rack space' than an Xserve cos it fits in a 1U rack mount space, which is the smallest you can use, just like a blade. If you mean they needed a blade cluster then that was correct when Xserve was first released but they now have third party clustering software and I'm sure Panther Server will have a full on clustering solution. (Clustering is using a whole bunch of machines, blades or otherwise and making them look like one big machine to anyone who wants to use them. Distributed computing made easy to use - you don't have to roll your own load balancing and fault tolerance software).
As for 'blades are a hell of a lot cheaper', this only applies for the hardware for Intel blades. Sun and other *nix blades are expensive. When you factor in the software licences for handling lots of users connected (e.g. for an ecommerce website) the Wintel solution becomes very expensive, Apple keeps its software costs per server rather than per user making it a lot cheaper for that example, with the possible exception of Lintel blades.
Most blade cluster buyers want to be able to add extra performance on demand and need all that performance to handle lots of users, leading to big software licencing costs. Pixar doesn't have lots of users connecting to their blade cluster, only people in their own company, not the general public using an ecommerce site. Therefore per-user licencing would be less of an issue for them, making Wintel or Lintel blades relatively attractive in terms of price / performance. Especially compared to the original Xserve which lacked performance relative to an Intel based blade. However the Xserve G5 will be another story due the big bump in performance, with hopefully not a big bump in price.
When Pixar needed a cluster of blades, a render farm for them, Apple weren't far enough down the road with Xserve and more importantly with XRaid for storage. Can you think of a company that generates more data than Pixar and therefore needs a top class storage solution?
This new machine (if it really exists) will be rack mountable, but it won't be a blade (1U or 2U max), it will be one big box with lots of CPUs. A 4U or 5U (ie it takes up 4 or 5 slots in a rack). It will be usable in a cluster as well but it will have the advantages of lots of CPU's without the headache of managing a cluster, which is quite complex. Think about how you would handle one of your machines in your cluster going down. This is why distributing computing, the magic bullet of the 90's took a while to take off. If you've given work to one machine, how do you know whether it has a) gone down or b) is just slow. Do you give the work to someone else, how do handle the results of the calc coming back? In a transaction processing environment, this is a nightmare. Hence you'll always need big boxes for some things and you'll need blade clusters for others.
Sanj
AidenShaw
macrumors P6
Chassis Blades vs 1U/2U Blades
Dense blade servers pack small, card-like blades into a chassis which contains power supplies, fans, network interconnects and the like. An individual blade is small - about the size of a full-length PCI card:
The support chassis has slots for many of these CPU blades:
In the case of the Compaq(HP) BL10 blade above - 20 CPUs sit in a 3U chassis, or effectively 0.15U. Other ffferings from HP, IBM and Dell are effectively 0.5U - 6 blades in a 3U, 12 blades in a 6U, or 14 blades in a 7U.
The Compaq blades have 1GHz CPUs, but that gives you 20 GHz of Centrino (Pentium 4) CPU power, 20 MiB of cache, 20 GiB of ECC DDR RAM, 8 GHz of FSB bandwidth, and 800 GB of disk in only 3U of space. (Each CPU is relatively modest, but for embarrassingly parallel jobs the aggregate power of all 20 in only 3U is superb.) BTW, you can buy the CPU blades in 10-packs - 10 blades come in one box.
IBM and Compaq BL20 blades are of the 0.5U variety, and offer dual CPU and Xeon support.
It is also common to call standard 1U and 2U servers by the name "blades" - since getting 20 to 40 servers in a standard rack is pretty dense.
Purists will try to say that a completely self-contained server like a 1U is not a "blade". They'll claim that "blades" refer to systems where a separate chassis provides support (power, cooling, network) for dependent CPU modules.
Dense blade servers pack small, card-like blades into a chassis which contains power supplies, fans, network interconnects and the like. An individual blade is small - about the size of a full-length PCI card:
The support chassis has slots for many of these CPU blades:
In the case of the Compaq(HP) BL10 blade above - 20 CPUs sit in a 3U chassis, or effectively 0.15U. Other ffferings from HP, IBM and Dell are effectively 0.5U - 6 blades in a 3U, 12 blades in a 6U, or 14 blades in a 7U.
The Compaq blades have 1GHz CPUs, but that gives you 20 GHz of Centrino (Pentium 4) CPU power, 20 MiB of cache, 20 GiB of ECC DDR RAM, 8 GHz of FSB bandwidth, and 800 GB of disk in only 3U of space. (Each CPU is relatively modest, but for embarrassingly parallel jobs the aggregate power of all 20 in only 3U is superb.) BTW, you can buy the CPU blades in 10-packs - 10 blades come in one box.
IBM and Compaq BL20 blades are of the 0.5U variety, and offer dual CPU and Xeon support.
It is also common to call standard 1U and 2U servers by the name "blades" - since getting 20 to 40 servers in a standard rack is pretty dense.
Purists will try to say that a completely self-contained server like a 1U is not a "blade". They'll claim that "blades" refer to systems where a separate chassis provides support (power, cooling, network) for dependent CPU modules.
fixyourthinking
macrumors 6502a
Also of Interest is eBay
eBay was very vocal about looking for new partners at their recent seminar as far as serving and hosting technology, especially on the security end. The graphics design department there is already a high percentage Mac. Fred Anderson (Apple CFO) joining eBay's board of directors yesterday puts an interesting spin on this.
I have also heard that Apple may start selling refurbs and older systems that are traded in at Apple stores on eBay as many other PC companies like Dell do.
Fred joins eBay:
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/cb_headline.cgi?&story_file=bw.071703/231985735
eBay University:
http://pages.ebay.com/university/
eBay was very vocal about looking for new partners at their recent seminar as far as serving and hosting technology, especially on the security end. The graphics design department there is already a high percentage Mac. Fred Anderson (Apple CFO) joining eBay's board of directors yesterday puts an interesting spin on this.
I have also heard that Apple may start selling refurbs and older systems that are traded in at Apple stores on eBay as many other PC companies like Dell do.
Fred joins eBay:
http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/cb_headline.cgi?&story_file=bw.071703/231985735
eBay University:
http://pages.ebay.com/university/
I really don't see how Apple can compete
Is Apple going to give OS X away for free? Thats the only way I see them being successful. Why isn't Windows involved in Hollywood? Simple, they require a license for every server. Thats why Linux rules in rendering. IL&M just did The Incredible Hulk with a 750 node--1500 AMD Athlon 1600 processor render-farm running Linux. The cost of the OS? $0. Can Apple compete with that? Maybe Steve Jobs will give away OS X.
Hollywood adopted Linux fast. SGI and Sun used to dominate the industry. But with Linux and Intel and AMD, they are saving a lot of money. And Linux is even being used on the desktop. It was easy to recompile the apps that ran on SGI. Maya and Shake come to mind. Now of course, Apple has bought out Shake. Are they going to buy out the whole industry?
I don't know, but I think the days of the big servers are coming to an end. Clustering is cheaper.
Is Apple going to give OS X away for free? Thats the only way I see them being successful. Why isn't Windows involved in Hollywood? Simple, they require a license for every server. Thats why Linux rules in rendering. IL&M just did The Incredible Hulk with a 750 node--1500 AMD Athlon 1600 processor render-farm running Linux. The cost of the OS? $0. Can Apple compete with that? Maybe Steve Jobs will give away OS X.
Hollywood adopted Linux fast. SGI and Sun used to dominate the industry. But with Linux and Intel and AMD, they are saving a lot of money. And Linux is even being used on the desktop. It was easy to recompile the apps that ran on SGI. Maya and Shake come to mind. Now of course, Apple has bought out Shake. Are they going to buy out the whole industry?
I don't know, but I think the days of the big servers are coming to an end. Clustering is cheaper.
Mr. Anderson
Moderator emeritus
If they're going to start at 8 processors in this thing could that mean that we might see 4 CPUs in a G5 tower?
Why jump from 2 to 8? It seems to me that 4 CPUs for a desktop is totally feasible - especially with the amount of room in the G5 case......😀
D
Why jump from 2 to 8? It seems to me that 4 CPUs for a desktop is totally feasible - especially with the amount of room in the G5 case......😀
D
no 64-way
The bus of the 970 only supports 16 processors so 64 processors in a single image is just not true. The 970 being only 16-way was announced with the original information. The 980 may be able to, or the 970 could with multiple boxes clustered, but there is no 64-way 970 box.
The bus of the 970 only supports 16 processors so 64 processors in a single image is just not true. The 970 being only 16-way was announced with the original information. The 980 may be able to, or the 970 could with multiple boxes clustered, but there is no 64-way 970 box.
That's one of the reasons why I'm not getting the first round of G5's computers. I think Apple will release workstation class computers soon, probably with more RAM and more processors, and hopefully with a real "Highend" graphics card. The reason I say this is because Apple is specifically marketing their new G5's as a personal computer for home use. Not as a workstation.
This is all my opinion of course.
Mr. Anderson
Moderator emeritus
I'm really starting to believe this myself.
I got the original G4 way back when (still using it too 😀) and I was really bummed when they came out with dual configs and even more so when I found out that I couldn't upgrade that 450MHz to a duallie.....
I'm going to wait a bit too I think, even though I really need a G5 for Lightwave....I'd be interested in the 8 cpu version of this thing, but if they make a quad G5 workstation that would be so much better.
Come on Apple, show me the power!
D
Re: Chassis Blades vs 1U/2U Blades
I stand corrected. I had never seen these dense blades before. Although I've just been told we actually have them in our machine room. You learn something new every day.
::Chagrin:: I thought I kept abreast of IT developments pretty well. Now I know what dense blades are, I have to agree that they would be a good product for Apple to have.
Sanjay
I stand corrected. I had never seen these dense blades before. Although I've just been told we actually have them in our machine room. You learn something new every day.
::Chagrin:: I thought I kept abreast of IT developments pretty well. Now I know what dense blades are, I have to agree that they would be a good product for Apple to have.
Sanjay
Re: I really don't see how Apple can compete
Is Apple going to give OS X away for free? Thats the only way I see them being successful. Why isn't Windows involved in Hollywood? Simple, they require a license for every server. Thats why Linux rules in rendering.
Remember that shake includes unlimited rendering lisences. also OS X server is much cheaper than windows Server and no sever taxes
Is Apple going to give OS X away for free? Thats the only way I see them being successful. Why isn't Windows involved in Hollywood? Simple, they require a license for every server. Thats why Linux rules in rendering.
Remember that shake includes unlimited rendering lisences. also OS X server is much cheaper than windows Server and no sever taxes
the semiconductor division and server division are seperate and often go different directions. The folks making the 970 just want to sell as many as possible and don't care if its to Apple or the server division.