The new XServe from Apple has dual 2.3 GHz G5 processors, and starts at $2,999 for a “cluster node” version, designed for use in High Performance Computing.
The new XServe from Apple has dual 2.3 GHz G5 processors, and starts at $2,999 for a “cluster node” version, designed for use in High Performance Computing.
XSAN file system released too!
It seems that with their current line up of unix systems (lets be frank, OSX IS UNIX) and storage, Apple is going to steal many workstation clients away from the likes of Sun, IBM and HP. Once an application like Autodesk is fully available and supported, and if Apple decides to pursue the Department of Defense secure desktop clients (which currently is Trusted Solaris), I don’t see why Apple can’t completely take over the unix workstation market. I just watched a Discovery Channel show on Burt Rutan and he himself uses these machines and hardware.
I’d like to see how a large cluster of these beasts would rank amongst the top supercomputers in the world. I remember that those 1100 Dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac’s broke like 3rd or 4th in the world.
Plus they dropped the price of their LCD monitors. 30″ is now 3K. ITS BUY TIME! ….forgot i don’t have a G5 with 6800. It’ll have to wait i guess.
X serve would be cool if it came in colors.
“Apple decides to pursue the Department of Defense secure desktop clients”
Apple and TerraSoft are making a cluster for US Army.
Mac OS X is NSA certified.
We bought the Xserve this morning.
It’s a strange thing to say about Apple, but you really can’t beat the price:performance with XServe. Especially with the unlimited server license.
The Xserve today is a SMB dream. And if Tiger Server shapes up as promised, with plug and play configuration for the SMB market–appealing to moderately technical people who need a GUI and wizards to get everything up and running–Apple will sell a ton of these.
What an amazing price for such sophisticated software.
Man alive, Apple is being very aggressive. It’s great to see.
I am sold as soon as we see good Access Control List features with Tiger
Hello,
sorry to say this, but not a single well known program from these areas is available for MacOSX at the moment, and I also don’t know about any anouncements. At the moment the developers of UNIX application move on Linux platform beside supporting the traditional UNIX-platform, they simply have no time or lust to support another platform. I would give my ringfinger to see Cadence, Mentor, Synopsis supporting MacOSX, but this won’t happen anytime soon :-(.
Anton
CAD, CAE and EDA are irrelevant to the X-Serve and X-San. They might be relevant to you, but not this topic.
If you up the ram on the compute node config you get a 2 proc G5 2.3 with 2 GB of ram for $200 more hp will sell you the same config machine with 2 2.2 AMD opeterons.
The case on the hp is slightly more expandable but the open firm ware is probably tons better that whatever lame bios comes on opteron(If someone knows better…).
Not sure which hardware is better at that price point but both are damn nice systems.
they are relevant, in my university one server would host the CAD app and every one would login to it and work on it;
one Xserve is very powerful, and can be used by several users at a time;
infact it could replace some sun ultras if apple tries hard;
cheers
ram
These applications are very relevant to this topic, because what files do you plan to store on these machines? Running Oracle (just recently announced, but until yesterday, nope), Informix, DB2 ? Nope. Any major middleware? NOPE. Autocad and other CAD files would be very appropriate on this type of platform. The market for clustered rendering servers is a narrow one, dedicated to those that the CG designers are used to (luckily Apple is one). However, to expand into other markets, CAD and databases would be the next logical step.
Can you imagine if Apple committed to a 4-way or even 8-way Xserver box? Literally, go after IBM in their own world?
The case on the hp is slightly more expandable but the open firm ware is probably tons better that whatever lame bios comes on opteron(If someone knows better…).
I’m not quite sure why you think this would be particularly important…?
In fact, G5 XServes are very common in bioinformatics.
Scientists don’t want to deal with complex system configurations, they just want a system that works, with NO virus/pop-ups.
Just get several XServes, networked them together with ethernet, setup NFS, and install Gridengine or XGrid, and you get a very nice compute farm.
Gridengine is free: http://gridengine.sunsource.net
and so is XGrid: http://www.apple.com/acg/xgrid/
The total system cost may be cheaper than a cluster of Windows machines, and OSX is simple enough that you don’t need to hire a sys admin.
I think you basically stated the main reasons xserves do well even if there are “better” options out there. The people buying these are the types who shear cost isn’t the most important factor, or even don’t know much of anything about working with such things. They just needs something simple that they can just hook up and go.
People will gladly pay more for anything they can just hook up and go with. Also being a apple/osx product it makes them a very well defined target for developers. Developers in time will realize that this is a great platform for them since it’s easy for them to support and if they make easy to use stuff for them, people will buy their stuff no problem.
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These applications are very relevant to this topic, because what files do you plan to store on these machines? Running Oracle (just recently announced, but until yesterday, nope), Informix, DB2 ? Nope.
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Oracle 10g is available from Oracle Technet since end of december.
You can use it on your newly purchased Xsan/Xserves.
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Any major middleware? NOPE.
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Depends on what kind of middleware you are looking for. Some folks say Tomcat is middleware. And Tomcat is available on MacOSX Server.
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Autocad and other CAD files would be very appropriate on this type of platform.
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You can store any filetypes you wish on your Xsan.
Hell, Oracle itself is using some terabyte sized XserveRaid systems for file storage.
It’s up to the ISV if and when it’s going to start porting its software over to MacOSX.
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The market for clustered rendering servers is a narrow one, dedicated to those that the CG designers are used to (luckily Apple is one). However, to expand into other markets, CAD and databases would be the next logical step.
Can you imagine if Apple committed to a 4-way or even 8-way Xserver box? Literally, go after IBM in their own world?
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If you need some big iron server today, you could get some decent Power4 or Power5 machine with AIX5L from IBM today. Next you would go to Oracle Technet and grab a (legally licensed) copy of Oracle 10g for AIX5L.
dude, IBM wins if apple sells more hardware – DUH. They are the ones that make their processor. It is in IBM’s best interest if more and more *nix operating systems (linux, MacOSX, *bsd) move onto the POWER architecture. Who cares if it eats into IBM’s AIX market (BTW: it won’t – Apple does not have 20 year support agreements), IBM has said that they want to support LINUX fully by 2012.
GO POWER!
Scientists don’t want to deal with complex system configurations, they just want a system that works, with NO virus/pop-ups.
Actually, in many academic surroundings the “ease of use” factor is usually a very minor consideration. They’ll usually get whatever system boasts the most MFLOPS for their budget. They’ll simply get a graduate student geek to take care of the system.
Usually, they can get away with this, but I’ve also seen situations where the student geek graduates and leaves, and the big expensive machine just sits there until the next student comes along.
Of course, I am not talking about the really big systems which are bought for the entire department. For those, they usually stick to whatever their IT department is familiar with.
The majority of the big energy and NASA shops out there (LANL, Fermi, JPL, Goddard, NOAA) cranking our production results do so on clusters running GNU/Linux, using open source message passing protocols like PVM and MPI, on top of parallel file systems or connected to a large NAS.
Scientists are increasingly running OSX on their desk/laptops but it’s linux cranking out numbers on big clusters.
Every now and then I’ll hear about a small 32 or 64 node cluster running Apple OSX that the local “high performance computing group” has purchased for the sake of tinkering with it.
But this is not to put down the article – there are plenty of operational clusters running linux on Apple G4 and G5 systems.
The important thing is that Apple now has a presence in that space. Before the XServe came out nobody would think to run Apple servers [I don’t recall them actually -having- dedicated server applications at that time].
Overall they don’t have more than a sliver of the market share but it is definitely a good thing that they are out there, building better soft- and hardware all the time. It demonstrates that the company can develop, produce and deliver production machines that organisations want to entrust mission critical projects to. And this is a process that is only just taking off. Up until few years ago you couldn’t find any decision maker [who was not an evangelist first] who would even consider using Apple in the server space. Now you can buy a solid system at a sensible price.
They’re doing good work. If nothing else it will force the other guys to take note and keep them on their toes. Everybody profits.
/looking forward to buying Tiger.
I’m sorry but you said that System X (Big mac) is running with linux, but I don’t find any links that claim that.
Indeed, on the VT site they say that System X is running on MacosX!
http://www.tcf.vt.edu/systemX.html
Ok I badly interpreted your post 😉
An earlier post claimed that OSX was certified by the NSA, just like Trusted Solaris. Can anyone post a link to an article or webpage that backs this up.
This may not be what you’re talking about but it’s close:
http://www.linuxsecurity.com/content/view/116681/65/
This is a GREAT price! These prices are alsmost that of the AMD64 market (maybe a few hundreds more). The features are great and I would really want to buy this machine.
“alsmost that of the AMD64 market (maybe a few hundreds more).”
You must be comparing lower spec’d AMD64 hardware because my comparisons showed the Xserves to be a few hundred less.
Like most Apple hardware, the XServe is less expensive to equally equipped x86 hardware.
“I’d like to see how a large cluster of these beasts would rank amongst the top supercomputers in the world. I remember that those 1100 Dual 2GHz G5 PowerMac’s broke like 3rd or 4th in the world.”
bigmac with 1100 2.3ghz g5’s came in at 7th (va tech got them before anyone else):
http://top500.org/lists/plists.php?Y=2004&M=11
In my classes, we HAD to learn UNIX (with the department’s Sun OS 5/Red Hat 7 cluster- yes, a combined system), and one teacher also told me, when I correctly spotted an xscreensaver screen saver, that to be accepted in science today you have to use Linux. Granted, they apparently also still use FORTRAN 77.
is that a suprise to you? it is not that anyone from under them came up… it is taht IBM and SUN and HP came out with crazy sized clusters in october that moved EVERYONE down the list.
you really think that an 1100 CPU G5 cluster can compete with 64,000 CPU clusters?
that prof is a moron then. Bionformatics is the next big field to be coming up in the world and they are one of Apple’s largest markets.
Unix is Unix is Unix. it is just a computing platform. any scientist that thinks you need a specific OS to be accepted is an idiot.
The total system cost may be cheaper than a cluster of Windows machines, and OSX is simple enough that you don’t need to hire a sys admin.
This is most certainly not the case. I have a cluster of 20 Xserves which we use for atmospheric modelling, and I’ve found that Apple’s attempts to simplify system administration are often leaky abstractions, which, if something goes wrong, require fairly involved command line interaction to fix.
The most notable problems are with OpenDirectory and KDC, which are both extremely finnickey and full of undocumented caveats which basically require reinstalling the system (or removing the .AppleSetupDone file in /var/db and redoing the initial system setup) if initially misconfigured. And by “initially misconfigured” I mean things as simple as if the password of the initial admin account (the 501 account) has a password longer than 8 characters, this will break OpenDirectory and the password server.
When trying to configure NFS shared home directories, the hostname assigned in OpenDirectory’s LDAP server for the NFS fileserver was incorrect but, for whatever reason, displayed correctly. Fortunately Workgroup Manager does make it easy to hand edit LDAP entries with a little tweaking, but still, when you need to go mucking around by hand inside LDAP something is certainly wrong.
And the decision to do these things wasn’t mine, I was on the phone with AppleCare Support the entire time, and they recommended to me removing the .AppleSetupDone file, nuking the NetInfo, OpenLDAP, and other databases and starting over from scratch, and hand editing LDAP entries because Apple’s attempts to automate these tasks had failed.
Overall, I’d say for an experienced administrator deploying an OS X cluster is substantially more difficult than deploying a Linux one.
If you have no system administration experience whatsoever, you’ll be on the phone with AppleCare for weeks/months before you can get an Xserve cluster going.
XGrid is even worse. Deploying it on a cluster is currently a major headache involving a large amount of both GUI and CLI interaction. Creating MacMPI executables which can run via XGrid is even worse.
We’re currently using LAM, and I’d contend that LAM is much easier to use than XGrid.
The closest you’ll get to turnkey clustering on Macs is likely Pooch, which is a lost less of a headache to deal with than XGrid.
Scientists don’t want to deal with complex system configurations
Scientists generally *don’t* deal with complex system configuration, simply because nearly all of them have an admin to do it for them.
oh please…. maybe the well funded which are a fraction of all the scientists. Having come from a grad program in Astrophysics I can certainly testify that we had one sysadmin – who handled the whole Astro program and half the space physics program. Anything that needed to be done other than keeping the system up and running and trying to hack the 30yo Fortran 77 for new data had to be done by our professors or we the students. Maybe if we had funding from the NIH like the pharmacology department we could hire programmers/admins…. but not in our department nor in any other college Astro department we collaborated with.
Well, commercial and government research places have admins, and they make up a very large percentage of research places. Academic research places have grad students who can do the job. Heck, if you’re in an educational facility, you can easily go find some clever undergrad to help you maintain your systems. They’re cheap and they love to get the work experience on their resumes.
too expensive