And yet Virginia Tech's X supercomputer runs Mac OS X.

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"Technically, OS X is very well suited [for clustering] but it does not seem to have made much headway"

People do what people are used to doing. Pixar is a good place to make a change. Jobs needs to give Disney/Pixar a tune-up...

OS X is kind of sluggish: Mach causes more per-event overhead than traditional UNIX and the result is an accumulation of delays that increases latency and hurts performance.

So not only is the XServe expensive, you need to install a traditional BSD or Linux on it to get the most out of it... and if you do that, why bother with an XServe?

I used to work there, but I quit when it became clear that Pixar has become an anti-Mac stronghold. They hate Macs with a passion and actively push employees to use the communistic Linux platform instead. It is sad, really, that a company with deep Apple roots has become so antagonistic to the system that made their very existence possible.

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Guest wrote:
OS X is kind of sluggish: Mach causes more per-event overhead than traditional UNIX and the result is an accumulation of delays that increases latency and hurts performance.

And you have metrics to prove this?

Besides, a custom image rendering application would spend most of its time in userland than in the kernel. In which case, your point (assuming it's valid) would be moot.

Folks, you wouldn't do graphics editing on Linux, you wouldn't control a nuclear power plant with Windows and you wouldn't run a high performance cluster on OS X. Yeah, I'm sure you can find a few examples of people doing so, but there is a very good reason why Linux is #1 on clusters.

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Guest wrote:
OS X is kind of sluggish: Mach causes more per-event overhead than traditional UNIX and the result is an accumulation of delays that increases latency and hurts performance.

So not only is the XServe expensive, you need to install a traditional BSD or Linux on it to get the most out of it... and if you do that, why bother with an XServe?

Wow--that was really stupid. I feel stupider for having read it.

You make me ashamed to be a guest, guest.

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Anonymous wrote:
Folks, you wouldn't do graphics editing on Linux, you wouldn't control a nuclear power plant with Windows and you wouldn't run a high performance cluster on OS X.

Folks, there's a prime example of someone choosing not to be confused with the facts.

Did you miss the posting near the top that mentioned Virginia Tech's supercomputer? At the time it was built, it was the third fastest supercomputer in the world yet cost just a small fraction of either of the top two. It ran Mac OS X.

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Yeah, I'm sure you can find a few examples of people doing so, but there is a very good reason why Linux is #1 on clusters.

Yep, just like there's a "good reason" why Windows is #1 on the desktop...

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Anonymous wrote:
So not only is the XServe expensive, you need to install a traditional BSD or Linux on it to get the most out of it... and if you do that, why bother with an XServe?

Trying to find a dual quad-core 3GHz Xeon server of the same specs for less. Maybe you can point one out?

Or are you just assuming that it is more expensive?

Actually, I think Guest is right. OS X has been shown to have some major overhead in thread/process dispatching compared to Linux. I'm not sure that would make a big different in this case, though (I don't know enough about how RenderMan works to even guess).

A little quick Googling reveals a few benchmarks:

Big gap in http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=2436&p=8
Smaller gap here, after tweaking OS X a bit: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html

So many opinions, so few facts.

/yawn