Mac OS X Server

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Apple has designed Mac OS X Server to leverage the computing power of 64-bit Intel and PowerPC processors, bringing next-generation performance to mainstream server computing. With superaccurate math calculations and access to massive amounts of memory, Mac OS X Server enables the most demanding scientific and technical computing applications. In fact, many of the core services in Mac OS X Server v10.5 — such as Apache 2, MySQL 5, Postfix, Podcast Producer, QuickTime Streaming Server, and Java VM on Intel — are now 64-bit, allowing you to take advantage of increased processing power and to work with larger data sets.

All apps welcome.

Mac OS X Server is the perfect platform for deploying 64-bit server applications, because it can also run today’s 32-bit applications natively. You can even run 64-bit and 32-bit applications simultaneously — without any negative performance impact or compatibility mode requirements. Unmodified 32-bit application code takes immediate advantage of faster processor clock speeds. And performance gains are even more dramatic when applications are recompiled to run on 64-bit systems.

64-bit memory addressing.

Mac OS X Server now supports 64-bit memory addressing, making it possible to run applications with data sets that require more than 4GB of memory. Ideal for high-performance server applications, computational engines, and other command-line applications, 64-bit memory addressing improves application performance and data access times significantly — because large data sets are loaded into memory, providing access that’s 40 times faster than on disk. In addition, some analytical applications that require the manipulation of large data sets in contiguous memory, such as genome assembly, can be performed only on systems with 64-bit memory addressing.

Mac OS X Server supports the standard LP64 data model, which means that code written for other 64-bit UNIX-based systems can easily be ported to Mac OS X Server.

64-bit file system.

HFS+ is a high-performance 64-bit file system that by default supports volumes up to 16TB using 4K blocks. On Mac OS X Server you can configure HFS+ volumes to use larger block sizes (for example, 8K, 16K, and so on) to support very large volumes (32TB, 64TB, and so on) for massive databases, image archives, and video storage.

64-bit math and image libraries.

Mac OS X Server includes optimized libraries that take advantage of the faster math functions supported by 64-bit processors. These advanced routines use the best-possible functionality for a specific processor, with optimum performance on 64-bit processors. Existing 32-bit applications that use the new math libraries will benefit — without modification — from these enhancements. Updated math, vector, and image processing routines include: