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Sun Reconsidering Solaris 9 for x86

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the try-debian-anyway dept.

jeffphil writes "This article reports that Sun is meeting with a group of Solaris x86 users called the 'Secret Six.' The group was created to convince Sun to re-examine its previous decision to cancel Solaris on the x86 platform."

1 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Release the source by mrm677 · · Score: 4, Informative

    You might be surprised. Pixar Studios, for example, uses Sun Enterprise 10000 machines for rendering their movies (so I was told this 6 months ago by one of their chief animators). Those max out at 106 processors per box, and Pixar has over 3000 CPU's. Do the math to figure out how many boxes that is. And maybe such a conversation did indeed take place:

    Mr. Smithers, get the CTO in here right now. Our animators say that Monster, Inc. is going to take another 3 months to render. Get some more of those 106-processor Sun boxes right now!

    Finally, to those who wonder why they don't use clusters instead of SMP machines? Pixar's rendering software algorithms are optimized for fine-grained communication patterns and simply would not work on a message-passing cluster.