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Lord Of The Rings Being Rendered Under Linux
Along with an adventuring band of others, tmatysik writes: "Came across this article in the New Zealand Herald the other day. Seems that Weta Digital is now moving over to Linux for the rendering work on Lord of the Rings. Two quotes from the article especially caught my eye: [1)]
'We were able to get the SGI 1200 servers for about $15,000 each or $7500 a processor, and they run more than twice as fast as the [$40000] Octanes for pure rendering.' [and 2)]
'Just by putting in a Linux processor, the price to do a frame is up to a tenth of the cost as on an SGI workstation [running SGI's Irix operating system] so the things we can attempt are more complex.'" Update: 08/27 09:35 PM by CT : Rebecca from WetaFX sent us pictures of the team, and the mighty stack that shall render lord of the rings.
A lot of comments here equate LoTR with the MPAA. While the film is being produced for and funded by a MPAA member, I think it bears pointing out that the LoTR people have negotiated a fair amount of freedom from MPAA influence, and that the production companies involved (WetaFX for example) are not subsidiaries of MPAA companies (even if most of their more recent income has come from MPAA members).
:-))
(And just to rub it in, the MPAA's region coding system is an illegal trade barrier in New Zealand
Unfortunately, if LoTR is as cool as it looks so far, the MPAA will reap the financial reward. On the bright side, it might convince them to break the mould again rather pump out more purile cringe-comedy films and the other garbage they won't leave alone.
Another pain for the boycott idea - how to support people like the LOTR teams while not supporting the MPAA. Sigh.
One of the big reasons is that the rendering software is expensive, and it's priced 'per processor', so you really want to have the processors be as fast as they can be. Right now, that means Intel architecture (here at Hammerhead we use Athlons); and Linux is by far the nicest way to use the IA32 machines.
Interestingly, the only company I can think of that doesn't use primarily IA32 boxes for rendering is Pixar (who write and sell RenderMan, the most popular rendering package). They use mainly Sparcs. One reason, I suppose, is that they don't have to pay for RenderMan :) The other is that on a speed/cubic-foot (as opposed to speed/dollar) metric; I'm told that the Sparcs are a little better. I don't believe that, though.
I interviewed people at every effects house a couple of months ago for an slashdot article I never finished :( and every single one was building Linux render farms.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Big Idea made the same decision not too long ago.
/. about rendering and Linux vs. SGI. It is great that there is now a story dedicated to it.
I never bothered to figure out what the cost/performance ratio was between the two platforms. I just knew that Linux was a lot cheaper.
The thing that suprises me is that they only have 16 boxes... and that this is newsworthy. We have 42 (with almost exactly the same config) and plan on ordering more in the near future.
One other difference is that they are using RenderMan and we are using Maya's renderer, which has recently been ported to Linux. For the type of work that we do, Maya is more than enough for us. Also, we hardly have any frame times of an hour... if we do, I yell and scream to get it cut down. The difference is that we are only rendering to 724x486. The use a higher resolution for the big screen, we only have to wory about NTSC for now.
The prices quoted in the article seem to be inflated a bit too. Unless they are quoted in the NZ dollar and that is about a 2-1 with the American. Octanes should be about $20k in the States. Linux boxes similarly configured, from VA, which we use, instead of SGI, are in the $5-6k range.
The performance boost that we have got from adding the Linux boxes is amazing. We went from being able to render on 50 MIPS CPU's 14 hours a day to rendering on an aditional 84 Intel CPU's 24 hours a day. The comparison in render speed is about 1-1, slightly infavor of the MIPS chip.
When it is all said and done, a move like this should be a no brainer to any studio. Rendering needs horsepower and system memory, both of which are cheaper in the Intel world. SysAdmins need Unix for ease of administrating and lack of down time... every studio I know considers the render system to be H.A. (high availablity). When things go down, projects get delayed... and that is a big no no in the production world (think of all the billboards you see with release dates on them... months in advance). Linux is a great choice for this.
The only drawback is that the SGI boxes have the ccNuma interface, which is great for single frame renders.
I know that I have posted many times on
FWIW: Our next two videos are the first to use our Linux render farm. Esther is at least 3/4 rendered on Linux boxes and Penguins will be mostly, if not all, rendered on Linux boxes.
-Tim Toll
Render Architect
Big Idea Productions
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
They'd have to take their head out of their ass before they could take their foot out of their mouth...
;)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
That's maybe 75% true. There are several requirements on the OS, though:
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
whine ();
}"
May I suggest.
while (!world->perfect) {
act ();
}
A Dick and a Bush .. You know somebody's gonna get screwed.
War is necrophilia.
You are probaly a troll, but I am hoping that you read slashdot because you are soul searching, or at the least curious, so ok-- i'll bite :)
:) One of my favorite ways to run linux is from my IRIX machines. I lose nothing. This goes for any UNIX variant. You have choice. And your investment will last. This is what the PC vendors don't wan't you to really know about UNIX hardware in general. Even standard PC hardware these days is pretty nice. They would much rather have you buy a new one every couple of years when windows gets too fat to run on the one you have.
Win2k would not ever be my choice. Much of what was discussed above does not apply. If you are interested in actually using the machine you are sitting at right now, then W2K will eventually fail miserably. Just think. What happens when a user wants something that has not been anticipated by all of the MS GUI designers? How about scripting? Real scripting, not just batch files. How about development. Granted the tools are nice in Gates land, but at what price? Visual Studio is a great place to work--provided that you are not interested in your code running anywhere else. Or even on the next version of the OS.
As for the BIG IRON days being numbered, you are way wrong. I do believe that cheap clusters will erode and change that market, but not eliminate it. Take a look at the new SGI server line. Modular cluster computing. You get to build what you want how you want, even take it a part and make smaller clusters. These machines in their largest configurations will handle 500 processors (probably more) all running under ONE OS IMAGE. There are many classes of computing problems that require this. Nobody is even close to this level of NUMA development. Also look around. SUN has been selling lots of their E10000 series machines. They sell these because they work, and they will keep working for a really long time. Big problems sometimes require big machines. This will not change. As all the machines mature, the problems will change, and become doable on smaller hardware, but that does not mean that the big stuff will become out of date, it means that it will just get used for something else.
I have older SGI machines pushing 10 years old doing things that are important to me. Because they run a UNIX variant, I am able to build software for them that was not even on the drawing board when the machine was made! Try that on Win 3.1.
Now where were we with Windows? Oh yeah accomplishing the same result. Rendering probably would work on W2K. It proabaly would even have similar performance. But I am certian in 5 years time that cluster will have cost more in license fees, administrative work, and scheduled downtime (read: upgrades) than any UNIX cluster will. Pick your vendor, does not matter.
As for long life windows does not stand a chance. Every try to do anything useful on a 10 year old pc with windows? Can you even find the software? Take that same machine running linux, and it can be a productive member of a network with zero trouble. Log on to it from a faster machine for display, and you may not even notice its age when doing day to day admin. Makes for great file servers, ftp, routing, mp3 players, lots of good stuff. You know since I began learning UNIX skills, I have not thrown away a machine since. I can ALWAYS FIND SOMETHING USEFUL TO DO WITH THEM.
The OS really means everything these days. I know because I run and administer a few of them. Windows machines of any variant give me more trouble than any other. Running windows means that I have to work the way I am supposed to. UNIX of any kind means that I work the way I want, from where ever I want.
Consider this last point. I really like working on an IRIX desktop. You know running UNIX machines means that I can sensibly do that for just about as long as I choose to. Not one penny of investment on any of the IRIX machines I deal with will ever be wasted until I decide that they are no longer worth it. Basically this means until they break.
Everything that I have learned about UNIX (and I started late) applies no matter what. Some machines will do more than others, and some will require a little different tweak here and there, but it all works the same. My experience on windows machines becomes useless as they change from year to year. I really hate that. Don't you?
Blogging because I can...
...unless Natalie Portman is playing one of the trolls who gets petrified, and who insists that the best way of cooking the dwarves is by pouring hot grits down their pants.
Also, Frodo would have to be escorted to the Cracks of Doom by a whole team lead by Beowulf (IOW, a Beowulf cluster).
Finally, this would have to be distinguished from the novels and the cartoons, not as the "live action movie", but as the "post-Columbine version".
I'm not sure if a penis-bird would have to be somehow involved, but it would help.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
>Hate to break it to you guys, but when you're
>doing "real work" like rendering (or anything >else), the OS is 100% totally and completely
>IRRELIVANT.
In theory, yes. Rendering is just math.
.... BUT. The os does come into play - context switching speed, VM system, general efficiency, etc.
Originally production houses were switching from SGI to NT boxes to save $$$$ - hard to justify the price performance of an Octane when a cheaper dual PIII would whip it in number crunching.
Now people are switching from NT to Linux. Personally I don't give a crap about what OS you use (i use both), but from my own personal benchmarks and graphics companies that i've contracted for, Linux can give 10-30% greater throughput on the same hardware.
Also - most large production houses WERE based on SGI's - so it is easier to move their custom code from IRIX to Linux.
(have you tried to administer NT boxes remotely? )
j
Hello, this is Frudu Baagins, and I pronounce Elbeereth as Elbeereth.
"The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed." - Alexander Hamilton
"I will take the Ring," he said, "though I do not know the way."
Lord of the Rings Being Rendered With Linux. Well, that it: the ultimate geek story. No point in hanging around trying to come up with something else. Let's all pack up and go home.
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Give me liberty or give me something of equal or lesser value from your glossy 32-page catalog.
For those interested, there was a BOF meeting at SIGGRAPH 2000 dealing with Linux and 3D. The notes by Brian Paul are already available: SIGGRAPH 2000 Linux / OpenGL / 3D Birds of a Feather Meeting
It's only twice as fast for rendering which is mainly a function of processor speed, system bandwidth and memory (and to a lesser extent network bandwidth). Intel and AMD processors are way faster than MIPS processors, but SGI has high througput systems, and also the best OpenGL implementation. They probably use the machines for interactive work during the day (and I don't doubt the new Octanes are better than any), but during the night they join the rendering farm, where they could really shine. Your claim about the software is incorrect, Photorealistc RenderMan runs mainly on Unix based OSes (Solaris, IRIX and Linux) and Windows NT. So they for sure have measured how "good" PRMan runs under de 1200 and standard Octanes, and the CPU performance would make a differnce.
Moderators: when the guy SHOUTS 'IRRELIVANT' he is doing it to piss people off. This is ill-informed flamebait.
A render farm *does* require these things of it's OS:
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Reliability. if you spend half your time crashing, rebooting, and redoing work that has been lost, you need twice as much hardware, at twice the cost, to get the same amount of work done.
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Low memory footprint. Rendering is very memory intensive. The less space that is wasted by the OS, the faster you go.
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Runs on the hardware that you have decided it approprite to your requirements.
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A nice, friendly, productive operating environment. Remember, many of these animators will be happiest telling the render machines what to do in a UNIX environment, coming from an IRIX background.
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An OS that keeps out of your way. Eg how much time does your OS spend sitting in the scheduler?
Sorry if I get a bit flamey, but this post is just *SO* overrated.Frodo: "Aww, crap! Not another Nazgul!"
Samwise: "Umm... Hey, Fro, that doesn't look much like a Nazgul to me!"
Gollum: "Then what the hell issss it?"
Samwise: (squinting) "Uh, I think it's a... it's a penguin!"
Frodo: "WTF!!?!?! There are no frickin penguins in Middle Earth!"
Gollum: "It'sss thosssse damn foolsss in ssspecial effectsss! They've ssscrewed up our precioussss movie, they did, they did!"
Frodo: "Hey, penguin! Get the hell out of here! We're trying to make a movie, dammit!"
Gollum: "Curssse thossse Open Ssssource bassstardssss! Thisss really pisssesss me off!"
Samwise: (Squints again) "Oh, never mind... it looks like it is a Nazgul after all! My bad!"
Frodo: (Smacks Samwise) "Dumbass!! Hobbits never, ever say 'My bad!'"
(Looks over at Gollum) "And what are you looking at, you shriveley little gimp?"
Gollum: "That'sss it! Ssscrew you guyssss; I'm going home!"
THE END
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
--
while ( !universe->perfect() ) {
hack (reality);
}
The thing is that people haven't touted Irix as being superior in performance for rendering, for doing the actual creation a SGI mips workstation will blow most anything away. Rendering is just pure and simple CPU, nothing really more than that, it doesn't take a big graphics pipe, just a big fast CPU, as long as the OS can get information from the drives to the CPU fast cool. Infact it running Linux has very little to it's performace, the x86 CPU is the one that is key there. Irix never was the slow point for rendering, but Irix only runs on mips and mips doesn't render fast. The operating system is MUCH less important than the CPU for rendering graphics (most of the time, never make a blanket statement).
Many shops are using commodity boxes for rendering (running Linux, BSD, Solaris x86, or even NT), but for most of those same shops you'll have to pry their SGI workstations out of their cold dead hands.
Linux and it's cost effective is a pretty useless point for most shops these days, the rendering software often costs 20+ times more than Irix does (lastest ver of Irix is $600), the savings comes in that you don't need that extra visual performance for rendering that the SGI system gives you, so you can use MUCH less expensive commodity hardware for that.
Spelling and grammar checker off because I don't care