65 thousand dollar question Post: 87119

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The Lounge What is on Your Mind? 65 thousand dollar question Post 87119 by bakunin on Thursday 20th of October 2005 07:09:11 AM

10-20-2005

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by mud

Thank you all for your replies.

Now I know Smilie

Still tho... 65 G's... Ouch!!! Smilie

I suspect however, that many big companies have no qualms about paying that kind of money.

Sort of like paying for a $10,000 toothpick Smilie

Not really. In big systems problems arise which are simply not present in small systems. For instance: a HDD has an average life cycle of (say) 5 years. If you build a system with one harddisk, you could expect (ov average) it to run these five years before breaking. You do not need a certain procedure for changing disks in this case. You simply take the risk of having one unplanned outage every five years.

Now suppose you have a system with several TBs diskspace and hence (again, say) 300 disks attached to it. Since all of them have a life expectency of 5 years a disk failure will happen on average every 5yrs/300, which is about once every week. In this case you need a procedure on how to change disks while the system is running or risk one unplanned outage every week.

This is why a Mac with a G5 processor costs only half as much as an Intellistation from IBM with the same processor - the difference is not only IBMs surplus factor (that too, but not only that), but also many features to make operating a data center with some thousand Intellistations *possible* (as opposed to "a complete nightmare"), unlike a datacenter with some thousand consumer-grade MacFrags with a nice design and nothing more.

This principle can be extended to software as well, but there is even another point: software is expensive to develop and cheap to sell. That means writing a program costs some effort while selling a copy of it costs nearly nothing. Hence, when you build software for some outlandish platform where you don't expect to sell many copies the price will be relatively high (very high in some cases), because it is the same effort to write the OS and sell it 100 times as it is to write it and sell it 100.000 times. Maybe the UNIX you say was some realtime OS (most Unixes aren't real-time at all) or for some extremely rare hardware (massively-parallel for instance?) or something such.

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LEARN ABOUT MOJAVE

hostinfo

hostinfo(8)						    BSD System Manager's Manual 					       hostinfo(8)

NAME

     hostinfo -- host information

SYNOPSIS

     hostinfo

DESCRIPTION

     The hostinfo command displays information about the host system on which the command is executing.  The output includes a	kernel version
     description, processor configuration data, available physical memory, and various scheduling statistics.

OPTIONS

     There are no options.

DISPLAY

	   Mach kernel version:
	   The version string compiled into the kernel executing on the host system.

	   Processor Configuration:
	   The maximum possible processors for which the kernel is configured, followed by the number of physical and logical processors avail-
	   able.

	   Note: on Intel architectures, physical processors are referred to as cores, and logical processors are referred to as hardware threads;
	   there may be multiple logical processors per core and multiple cores per processor package.	This command does not report the number of
	   processor packages.

	   Processor type:
	   The host's processor type and subtype.

	   Processor active:
	   A list of active processors on the host system.  Active processors are members of a processor set and are ready to dispatch threads.
	   On a single processor system, the active processor, is processor 0.

	   Primary memory available:
	   The amount of physical memory that is configured for use on the host system.

	   Default processor set:
	   Displays the number of tasks currently assigned to the host processor set, the number of threads currently assigned to the host proces-
	   sor set, and the number of processors included in the host processor set.

	   Load average:
	   Measures the average number of threads in the run queue.

	   Mach factor:
	   A variant of the load average which measures the processing resources available to a new thread.  Mach factor is based on the number of
	   CPUs divided by (1 + the number of runnablethreads) or the number of CPUs minus the number of runnable threads when the number of
	   runnable threads is less than the number of CPUs.  The closer the Mach factor value is to zero, the higher the load.  On an idle system
	   with a fixed number of active processors, the mach factor will be equal to the number of CPUs.

SEE ALSO

     sysctl(8)

Mac OS X							 October 30, 2003							  Mac OS X