[schalliol]

Wow, check it out on Apple's site.

They are dual 1.33GHz machines with:

256MB RAM
ATA 60GB drive
Single drive bay
No optical drive
NO VIDEO CARD
Only one Gigabit Ethernet interface
Two 64-bit, 66MHz PCI slot
No combination PCI/AGP slot
10-user OS X Server license

http://www.apple.com/xserve/specs.html

[schalliol]

bump...

So.....what do you all think about this new machine?

Here are some thoughts to get ya started:

1. If it has no video, does it have a default network setting that you use to manage it?
2. If it only have one drive module, I guess it's not really hot swappable, is it?
3. Does Apple have the market to support it?

[chris v]

If yr. gonna cluster 10 Xserves anyway, mifght as well pay $1000.00 less for nine out of ten.

Don't know about the market, but it seems to make sense.

CV

[schalliol]

Certainly it will make clustering a more attractive option. Do you think many will do it? How difficult is it? Can you cluster and serve files as though it were one machine, or are we stuck with churning data here?

I see Xserve cluster nodes as being excellent with an Xserve RAID if they can be used to do things like host webservers.

[chris v]

I think they're aiming them at more processor-intensive fields, like render farms, scientific simulation (NASA, weather modeling, biotech, etc.) than webserving, which is more of a bandwidth thing.

How many millions of hits would a webserver need before a dual 133 got overwhelmed processor-wise? That's something I don't know too much about, but apparently clustering with OS X server is not too difficult.

I'm kinda fantasizing about a Photoshop cluster.

CV

[drmbb2]

Actually, I don't quite understand dropping a video card. You can buy 4, 8, or even 16Mb cards in bulk for less than $15/card. These things only need a rudimentary display for admin purposes. Our 21 XServe cluster has a KVM switch in the rack, and it shares it's display with the cruddy little drawer-style LCD/keyboard on the adjacent rack of 24 DP Intel cluster nodes. It makes it real easy to key up whichever node we want, be it one of the XServes or PIII machines, and do any individual maintenance or whatever on a given machine. I mean, in a cluster environement (i.e. Beowulf configuration) you still sometimes need to deal with individual machines and may not want to have to remote login to do it, but just take the problem node out of the array and work on it by itself.

Still, a price drop on XServes is a good thing - their price is the only real downside (i.e. compared to really cheap PIII and PIV rack systems). And I suppose you could just get your own dirt cheap 4Mb PCI video cards and dump them in.

[Graymalkin]

You need a new IT staff if you're managing a cluster of systems witha KVM switch. It is a cluster of networked computers with network addressible shells or at the very least a remote GUI option. Run dsh on your control system and you can perform the same task on all your nodes with a single command.

Cluster nodes shouldn't NEED video by definition, they're supposed to be headless systems. If you need to monitor your systems you use SNMP. If something goes wrong you've got ssh. If you want things to run there's cron. You're using Unix man, why in the world do you need video on cluster nodes?

A video card is just one more device sucking down power and should be a redundant piece of equipment on a Unix server system.

[macmad]

can anyone who knows more about this than I do comment on whether these things might find themselves in Pixels rendering farm?

[drmbb2]

Originally posted by Graymalkin:
You need a new IT staff if you're managing a cluster of systems witha KVM switch. It is a cluster of networked computers with network addressible shells or at the very least a remote GUI option. Run dsh on your control system and you can perform the same task on all your nodes with a single command.

Cluster nodes shouldn't NEED video by definition, they're supposed to be headless systems. If you need to monitor your systems you use SNMP. If something goes wrong you've got ssh. If you want things to run there's cron. You're using Unix man, why in the world do you need video on cluster nodes?

A video card is just one more device sucking down power and should be a redundant piece of equipment on a Unix server system.

Actually, I completely disagree with you, and our IT department is pretty darn savvy. In our division's case (we are part of the IT department), our two clusters are small, single rack arrays (with shared RAID) running highly specialized molecular biology applications (and in the case of the Linux cluster, a lot of non-standard things like MOSIX kernels, PVFS, etc). They also get used a lot for developing new parallel applications for biological computing. While we do indeed do a lot of remote admin tasks, having the KVM switches and a single shared drawer-style monitor/keyboard is just very dang convient, especially when setting up the nodes in the first place, or when trying out major new configuration changes (like when we upgraded all the PIII boxes to gigabit internet). Our Linux cluster shipped with the display/keyboard and KVM in the rack as part of a standard configuration, which is very common, in my experience, from many small companies specializing in Beowulf systems for academic and scientific research.

A PCI video card is a trivial thing to include, both in terms of cost, and power consumption, and can make life a lot easier at times. Not always necessary, true, but handy.