Sorry, I do have this evaluation in a spreadsheet somewhere (except against the Tesla K20, K80 wasn't out then), but I just quickly looked up the Mac Pro specs. We do use the D500, so I should have quoted those gflops. There is a benefit to off-the-shelf GPUs, but I don't see it as a make-or-break kind of situation for imgix right now.
I agree that some day in the future, it does seem like it will make sense to bite the bullet and rewrite for Linux. It probably won't solely come down to a cost rationale though, because there are a TON of business risks involved in hitting pause on new features (or doubling team size, or some combination thereof).
Fundamentally I don't believe in doing large projects that have a best case scenario of going unnoticed by your customers (because the external behavior has not changed, unless you screwed up), unless you absolutely have to.
The real reason to migrate to Linux would have to be a combination of at least three things:
1. Better hardware, in terms of functionality or price/performance
2. Lower operational overhead
3. The ability to support features or operations that we can't do any other way
Much more likely, we would adopt a hybrid approach where we still use OS X for certain things and Linux for other things.
We do use the D500, so I should have quoted those gflops.
Well now I'm curious as to why you aren't using the D700s. The extra gflops seem like a good value to me. Approximately 60% greater GPU performance for a 15% increase in cost, everything else being equal.
But you probably have to get some work done, rather than answer random questions from the Internet. :-)
It is intriguing, and we have one D700 Mac Pro for test purposes. At the time we ordered the Pros for the prototype rack that is the subject of this article, we found that other parts of our pipeline were preventing us from taking full advantage of the increased GPU performance. So we ratcheted down to the D500.
Keep in mind that either of them offer significantly higher gflop/s per system than the best GPU ever shipped on a Mac Mini (480 vs 2200 vs 3500).
However, we have fixed bottlenecks in our pipeline as we identified them, so it is probably time to re-evaluate. I actually just had a conversation with an engineer a minute ago who is going to jump on this in the next few days. Higher throughput and better $/gflop is always the goal, just have to make sure we can actually see the improvement in practice.
I agree that some day in the future, it does seem like it will make sense to bite the bullet and rewrite for Linux. It probably won't solely come down to a cost rationale though, because there are a TON of business risks involved in hitting pause on new features (or doubling team size, or some combination thereof).
Fundamentally I don't believe in doing large projects that have a best case scenario of going unnoticed by your customers (because the external behavior has not changed, unless you screwed up), unless you absolutely have to.
The real reason to migrate to Linux would have to be a combination of at least three things:
Much more likely, we would adopt a hybrid approach where we still use OS X for certain things and Linux for other things.