[microcolonel]

They say “Apple‘s operating system offers numerous advantages over other platforms when it comes to image processing, and it is also favored by many designers for the same reasons.”

Although I have no idea what those advantages could be.... AppleScript+Photoshop? Who knows... On any platform you have essentially the same choice in performance and flexibility of imaging libraries, so it's anyone's guess for now what they think they need them for.

It's especially funny because of just how much they talk up fibre connectivity, and how the copper is just used as a fallback management fabric.... but these Mac Minis are obviously connected with copper.

[defen]

If you use CoreImage you get a ton of GPU-optimized filters for free, plus you can compose them at very little cost. For example if you wanted to crop, scale, rotate, and guassian blur an image, you can do that with one pass through the GPU instead 4.

[Keyframe]

I think ImageMagick also supports GPU/OpenCL if you compile it in.

[shiven]

As kogir mentioned elsewhere in the thread, ImageMagick is not designed to be used as a long running process, it will destroy RAM and likely lead to stability issues.

I think with OSX they used the right tool for the right job, because, as always, there is never a perfect solution to any problem on the trilateral axis (good/fast/cheap).

[KaiserPro]

I still don't understand this, why would you keep imageMgick running for more than one image?

[Keyframe]

Destroy RAM? What?

[shiven]

I know! I was being hyperbolic, but you get the idea :-) Memory leaks are almost the same thing, perhaps worse. You can always change a stick of RAM, but chasing down memory leaks, that's more than a 5 min job!

[skuhn]

Sorry for any confusion with the fiber optic cabling; that connects to the uplinks on our production top of rack switches. The copper cabling is used to uplink our management switches and for serial consoles on the switches and CDUs.

The excess unlit fiber capacity lets us install more switches or bring up more uplink ports for a particular rack, as necessary.

One thing that we had to cut for length is how our cabinets are built: we work closely with our systems integrator on a few rack designs that we re-use often, and they build, test and cable (with cat6) every server in the rack according to that design. Once a rack rolls onto the datacenter floor, we bolt it down, connect ground and power leads, and run short patch cables from the switch uplinks to the patch panels suspended from the ladder rack above each cabinet position.