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Macintosh Clustering
HiredMan writes: "Wired is running an article comparing the set-up and admin of Linux Beowulf clusters versus Mac based clusters. Slant of the article is that the Macs are easier to set-up, maintain and are more flexible. They note that the Linux "how to" manual is 230 pages while the corresponding Apple document is a 1 page PDF file. Dauger Research of former Appleseed fame is mentioned as well, of course. MacSlash is also covering the article. Let the on-topic (for once) Beowulf comments fly..."
I don't think this comment is insightful at all, but hey - I don't have moderator points today, so I'll argue.
The fact that the manual is shorter - VASTLY shorter in this case does in fact imply that accomplishing a task is easier.
Here's the skinny: Human factors. A one-page PDF is easier to scan and reference than a 200-page text file without references or pointers. If references an pointers are added along with a TOC, then scanning for specific instructions becomes much easier.
Comparing a 200-page document written by programmers to a one-page document made possible by a more graceful GUI and architecture, and written by professional tech writers is ludicrous. Less instructions to accomplish the same task = easier. Plain and simple.
yes, but according to the article they got a sixth-grader in Hawaii to set one up. Doesn't that say something about ease of use? --Triv
Cost of 10 good Intel machines to install Linux on... trivial (pobably about $15,000)...
Cost of 10 good Highend Macs, (about $30,000)...
Both are in the trivial range compared to the costs of time, energy, etc.
There is a more important question, which machine gives you the most bang for your buck?
We know that Photoshop runs better on the G4, what about your operation?
If the Mac gets a 2:1 performance advantage, then the costs are equal. If the Mac out-performs it regardless, you get an advantage.
For the moment, let's assume that you are getting real machines that are tested, not parts off of a sketchy vendor from pricewatch.com. If you are really trying to build a parallel computer, you want real systems, not junk that may or may not work.
This also rules out eMachines, or home computers. You are basically in the Compaq Workstation, Dell Workstation, HP Workstation, or IBM Workstation area. You aren't setting up a bunch of Presarios.
In fact, my first inclination is to try to use the Beowulf stuff rather than Pooch simply because such a detailed work exists and is available for Beowulf clusters, but I don't know if any such information exists for Pooch.
What surprise that we're in a market based economy.
... and Macs are by far the most reliable platforms in terms of hardware failure or incompatiblies that arise from drivers, etc. (Note: I am exclduing all Powerbooks. I'm well aware of the 5300 being the exact opposite of what I'm saying .. those things were more trouble than ANY platform I've ever worked on.)
.. I'm only trying to debunk some of the most commonly lobbed FUD against the Mac platform, especially as it relates to its (supposed) unsuitability to non-multimedia related tasks. :)
The market always wins. The social costs (ease of maintenance, accessibiliy, at the (granted) cost of performance) are almost always ignored when people vote with individual walets.
Natch:
> Anything goes wrong with a PC node
Thats cause stuff goes wrong far more often in a PC envrionment. I say this with 10 years of computing experience on both platforms. YMMV, and I'm sure I'll collect anywhere from 2 to 200 replies either quoting amazing PC/Linux uptimes or terrible Mac related experiences, but I've worked, at length and in technical situations with MacOS, Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, HPUX, AIX, Solaris
> Plus you can modify bits of Linux
OSX, the kernel is Open Source, so you are free to munge around with it, although I havn't gotten a chance to look deep into it, so I'm not sure of the extent of the validity of this.
OS9, removing kernal modules from the OS is a simple point and click, although I think there is obviously more code in the base system than on a bare bones Linux system. Again, trade offs are unavoidable.
It is only because Apple sells their OS as 'easy to use' to people assume this is equivilent to 'non customizable'. Any dedicated mac techie knows that while MacOS ain't as granular as Linux in its customizability, the perfornace loss in putting your CPU against surperfluous tasks pays back in the other advantages of the platform.
Note that I'm not arguing that MacOS is better to cluster than Linux
What I love the most is how people expect computers to be cars. Ie, if its more expensive, it had better be faster. Man, I'll take a slower and more enjoyable and pain-free computing experience any day of the week, which is why my dream setup would be OSX by default, then Linux or some BSD variant (I'm a programmer on FreeBSD), and then Windows. This holds true even in computationally-intensive tasks. If I can't enjoy the experience of doing it, I don't want to do it, even if it can be done faster or cheaper. My happiness and level of stress is more important than speed.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Actually, native Cocoa apps have the capability to be built using distributed objects quite easily. In fact, the mechanisms used for multithreaded communication (NSConnection, NSPort, etc) are the same classes you use to communicate with other processes - on ANY machine.
The mechanism they use relies heavily on the dynamic nature of Objective-C objects, so I'm guessing it's NOT based on some standard (SOAP,CORBA,RPC,.NET). That would make it hard to integrate it into any cross platform clusters, but we were talking about Photoshop, weren't we?
So, it boils down to simply this: If you write a Mac OS X app, write it threaded and use Cocoa. If you do that, you'd be amazed what sort of functionality you get for 'free' - including being able to distribute your app across clusters!
Down with Carbon!
Culture is more than commerce
The point isn't flexibility: sure you can be more flexible with a Linux-based cluster. You can tweak and tune a Linux-based cluster to meet your specific needs. This is why Google uses such a cluster.
The point isn't about cost: the real difference between a decent name-brand PC and a Mac is negligible. In the case of these Mac-based clusters, since the clustering software is just another app, a Mac-cluster can be setup and torn down quite readily. You come into the lab on Wednesday to find your workstation has been appropriated for the cluster.
The point is accessibility! If you're a physicist in a small school looking to model some complex interaction, you can rent some computer time from somebody (expensive), build a cluster (very expensive, because you'll have to hire somebody to do it--physicists aren't likely to be Beowulf experts), or use the Mac clustering software (expensive, because you'll have to buy the machines if you don't already have it, but you can do it yourself, quickly, without much bother).
Accessibility! It's what keeps Apple in business. This is another example of it.
I'm pretty disappointed in the posters who knock it, because it strikes me that they are a bit put out that they won't remain the Technical Elite because they've got the spare time to read the 230-page Beowulf manual.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
I recall, back when CD-ROMs were fairly newfangled, the "manual" that came with the CD, if it was a dual-platform disk, often offered an interesting contrast.
The Windows instructions would go on for pages, discussing running the installer application, how to get the right drivers, etc.
The Macintosh instructions were usually:
I never understood why Apple didn't market that advantage heavily.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Everyone here seems to be suggesting that the manuals indicate nothing. "Apple has weak docs!" seems to be the summary. But can we entertain the notion that perhaps while 1 page is too short, 230 pages is far too long? If so, is this because the people who wrote the manual are not professional authors, and got too wordy? Or is it because Linux just isn't usable enough?
And whatever you think, isn't it reasonable to suggest that making Linux more intuitive and the manuals more succinct might help rid us of idiot lusers who won't RTFM? They won't really go away, but if we actually take usability seriously, perhaps developers can get half those people to solve their own problems. Wouldn't this be a good thing? I guess that's a rhetorical question -- I am sure it is a good thing. I spend my entire workday building apps for people, and one usability tweak can mean the difference between 20 nagging people a day and 2. My team even has blacklisted a couple people in the company, whose projects are always time-sinks to build and time-sinks to maintain. Why? Because those people are control freaks who won't let us fix usability errors, and my team ends up spending their days on support. If you can build something intuitive and usable, both the users and the developers will be much happier.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
10 good Intel machines will not cost less than $10,000. For scientific work, I don't consider eMachines or your grey-boy solutions a "good" system.
So, I took the bait... I went to Compaq's site and spec'ed out an equivalent workstation. Note, I'm not souping up the video card or CD-ROM like the Apple workstations. No need to waste money.
Compaq Evo Workstation W6000, Intel Xeon 2.00 GHz/512K processor, dual processor... Upgrading to 512MB RAM. $3521.00. Note that this machine only has 10/100 networking. The Apple has Gigabit. This should matter in a cluster.
Dell Workstation 530. Intel Xeon 2.0 GHz x2, 512MB RAM, and an upgraded sound card (Dell won't sell a dual-proc workstation without an $80 soundcard upgrade... weird). Dell did let me downgrade the video card annd monitor... Price: $3878.00. Unlike Compaq, I could buy the Dell workstation with Linux (supported) instead of NT and needing to swap OSes.
Next I went to Big Blue. They push Linux, they should sell me good Linux workstations. When I bought my last round of Penguin Computing machines (to run OpenBSD and Linux) I looked at IBM first...
IBM's only dual processor workstation, the IBM Intellistation M Pro 6850 Tower. With a second 2.0 GHz Xeon processor, $5218.
Real computers cost money. Flaky machines that hardware lock from time to time do not. You can't compaq the Apple workstations to the bottom-barrel systems.
In fact, at $1300 for the lowend iMac (700 MHz G4), admittedly with a silly flatscreen for this project, or $2300 for the midrange (933MHz) G4, Apple hits some good price points for this.
Look, the new G4s (in the 933MHz and 1GHz-dual models) are sporting a 2MB L3 cache! That's damned impressive. A 2MB L3 cache should make cache misses SO infrequent that the slower memory bus speed is irrelevant.
Look, if you need lots of power, you used to need to stop millions. You're not going to cut corners on your machines. You're looking at $3500 for an Intel dual-Xeon based solution or $3000 for the dual-G4 based Apple solution. Sure you get an unneeded Superdrive, but who cares? When the project is over, I bet you everyone in the lab is happy to take one of the Superdrives home...
Geeze people, get a grip.
Apple's G4 workstations are not the same quality as the computer you have in your room in your parent's house. These are real machines with:
Gigabit Ethernet (very significant for a cluster, and unlike the PC's 32-bit, 33 MHz bus, real machines like the Apple, Compaq, or Dell workstations have 64-bit OR 66 MHz (sometimes both) PCI busses so you can actually USE the Gigabit Ethernet.
The Apple's L3 Cache has 2MB DDR SDRAM at up to 500MHz, this is much faster than the 266MHZ DDR in PCs and comparable to the PC800 RDRAM in the Dell/IBM workstations. Sure the System RAM is slower, but a 2MB L3 cache makes this less relevant.
The Superdrive, Firewire, and Video cards are all unnessary here, but they are actually really nice features if these machines will be reassigned as desktop machines when the project is over. You could buy new PowerMacs with the G5s ship within 6 months and reassign these as desktop machines. The real workstations are the same. You $45000 cluster of crap machines won't take you very far. They are trash when replaced, and if the machine hasn't been QC'd? Well, time to explain that your project needs to start over.
Come on people... Quake != scientific computing