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Lucasfilm CTO Cliff Plumer Talks Technology

Given the [b]opening of the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco's Presidio, the new home of Lucasfilm, Industrial Light & Magic and LucasArts,[/b] along with subsequent announcements such as HP becoming Lucasfilm's preferred technology provider and ZBrush being added to the ILM pipeline, VFXWorld invited Barbara Robertson to dig a little deeper with Lucasfilm cto Cliff Plumer.

[...]

BR: Does everyone get new machines at the Presidio?
CP: They're transitioning. [b]Our three key vendors for the desktop are HP for workstations, AMD for processors and NVIDIA for graphics. Everyone is moving toward 64-bit workstations.[/b] Most have dual heads [monitors] today. They will all have dual processors. We're working closely with AMD, our processor vendor on dual core processors. We'll get to the stage over the next year where artists will have a dual core dual processor -- two processors on one chip; like four CPUs. Plus, two graphics cards. We're looking at a workstation equivalent on the desktop that's more powerful that what we used to have with a fully blown SGI Onyx, something ILM once paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for.

Our render farm [Angstrom Microsystems(TM)] has about 3,000 processors and we have a proprietary tool that lets unused desktops become part of the render pool at night, so we can scale up to over 4,000 processors.

http://vfxworld.com/?sa=adv&code=7086b920&atype=ar ticles&id=2608

Lucasfilm Selects HP Technology
ASIA PACIFIC, Singapore, September 13, 2005 - HP and Lucasfilm Ltd., the leader in visual effects and sound engineering for feature films, today announced a global, three-year, multi-million dollar technology and marketing agreement.

Lucasfilm will use HP Adaptive Enterprise solutions to generate new video games, visual effects and animation. The HP technology, also being used to store and manage LucasFilm's business applications, will be deployed at Lucasfilm's new Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco and at the company's Singapore operations.

Lucasfilm will roll out up to 1,000 high-performance HP workstations powered by Dual-Core AMD Opteron processors for the production of its visual effects and video games. The HP xw9300 Workstation environment at Lucasfilm will run both Linux and Windows XP operating environments in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes, with in-house software applications for creation and editing.
http://www.hardwarezone.com/news/view.php?id=2553

21 avril 2004: Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) selects Angstrom Microsystems(TM) as provider of next generation server render farm [Opteron]
http://www.angstrom.com/about/press20040421.htm

18 avril 2005 : At NAB today, AMD and DreamWorks Animation SKG Inc. announced a three-year strategic alliance naming AMD the Preferred Processor Provider for DreamWorks Animation and enabling the company to experience significant advantages in their computer-generated ("CG") filmmaking process.
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Corporate/VirtualPressRoo m/0,,51_104_543~96831,00.html

I'm not sure if you're talking about equipment that has been donated to you or if you're talking about buying equipment that you are going to donate. If the later, you might consider Telco equipment designed to run on -48V DC power. It's going to be more expensive than a cheap Dell, but they're built to more demanding standards. A quick Google turned up a couple of links:

http://www.angstrom.com/products/viper.htm
http://www-1.ibm.com/servers/eserver/pseries/hardw are/tour/briefs/telco_server.html

Or just a -48V power supply.

http://www.zantech.com.au/zantech/power-supply-atx -48v-dc/

Alternatively, you could look at products geared for automotive use. Look at what people are using for in car computers running directly off of a 12V supply. They should also be pretty robust, although I think the Telco standards are probably more demanding (though buying NEBS3 certified equipment will really cost you.)

By running off a DC battery directly you provide a buffer against the flaky AC power distribution while saving the complexity of a UPS doing AC-DC-AC.

The Itanium is a dud: systems based on it are hugely expensive, have iffy performance, and are not usefully x86 compatible.

Hugely expensive? You can get yourself a nice Itanium-2 workstation for less than you get get a 2x1.4G Opteron box

Iffy performance? Fastest SPECfp2000 result, bar none. Second fastest SPECint2000 result, clock-for-clock: only HP's awesome PA-8700 is ahead.

Not usefully x86 compatible? It's more than enough to run acroread. For everything else, you've got source, right? With over 90% of Debian packages available for IA64, and three free (as in beer) compilers for Itanium available to download, what's the problem with porting?

AMD aren't going to have a big winner on their hands. They're going to have another Athlon - enough to make an initial impression, that slowly fades into market oblivion over a few years as Intel take advantage of an inherently superior architecture while AMD are stuck trying to make their 64 bit extension of a 32 bit extension of a 16 bit extension to an 8 bit microprocessor go faster.

Do you think Intel are stupid, or something?

I think there are some other companies that do the same thing, but the name escapes me now.

You might wanna take a look at this 1U Quad AMD system from Angstrom Computers

Personally, I haven't heard of any Quad CPU AMD mobo's at all

In the meantime, my company would LOVE to put some stuff together. We've already started helping a bit. rational software is putting together a van full of equipment and people to deliver. Please contact Ali Kaufman to see if you can help at all.

If you know of anyone else who can use computers or equipment in the NYC area in relation to this disaster, please tell her or me, dave, and we'll try to coordinate!! It's better than just sending a bunch a stuff and people down and saying, "TAKE IT!"

Dave

In the meantime, my company would LOVE to put some stuff together. We've already started helping a bit. rational software is putting together a van full of equipment and people to deliver. Please contact Ali Kaufman to see if you can help at all.

If you know of anyone else who can use computers or equipment in the NYC area in relation to this disaster, please tell her or me, dave, and we'll try to coordinate!! It's better than just sending a bunch a stuff and people down and saying, "TAKE IT!"

Dave