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Weta Digital's Render Farm Upgrade
Headspace2 writes "Weta Digital (The graphics company behing LOtR computer effects) has just purchased 220 2.2GHz dual Xenon machines, each with 4GB of ram, to add to their current render wall of 350 1 Ghz P3 systems. They have also placed an order for another 256 Xenon servers. And it's all running Linux. My favorite
quote is 'it is thought the server farm will be the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere'. They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere' Congrats the guys that get to play with all those clock cycles.
Make more movies.
Powered by noble gas. Woohoo!!
Wow. I wonder what their Distributed.net keyrate would be?
Give the the warm orange glow of dual neon machines any day.
...will correct you on "Xenon" while completely missing "behing".
Typical Slashdot.
"The servers run in parallel and major jobs are broken down for each server. It is networked together with 100Gbps ethernet and Foundry networking switches...."
A hundred gigabits per second? Dude! Sign me the hell up!
You could use xenon to power a quantum computer. Dual xenon = 2 xenon atoms = 2 qubits, which could be roughly 64 bits, or the processing potential of a potato.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
... in some of the decentralized computing efforts, coming from the southern hemisphere?
...
Team LotR strikes at Distributed Folding, ECCP, Folding@Home, Genome@Home, OGR (24 and 25), RC5, Sengent D2OL, SETI, UD
Cheers, Nostrada
And yet they still can't make Frodo look like a guy.
>> They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere'
So that morons like Taco can point this out to their long-suffering girlfriends?
Who gives a fuck. Seriously dude, get a hold of youself and try not to be a weiner all your life.
And Noah said, "God...what's a qubit?"
CAUTION: Product may be hot after heating
Talk about vaporware!
Marcelo Vanzin
a single one of these!!!!
The previous "largest server farm in the Southern Hemisphere" was in Tonga where 7 486s could render a scene from Tribes 2 in less than 17 minutes.
So suck on that Tonga. And you never had the first dawn of the new millenium either.
:wq
Actually it is the British who decided where 0 degrees longitude was, and thereby the Eastern/Western hemispheres. Why do you think it runs through Greenwich Englind? If an American had first invented the Naval Chronometer instead of Harrison, 0 degrees longitude would run through Washington D.C. or New York City, and not the British Royal Naval Observatory.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. You could try, but you'd fail.
Yes, the Prime Meridian (0 0' 0"), is situated at the Royal Observatory and Planetarium (that's its correct name), but its adoption as the international standard has nothing to do with the invention of the "naval chronometer" by John Harrison in 1735.
I'll let the Observatory's own pages tell the story:
Until the nineteenth century, each country tended to keep its own zero meridian. The Prime Meridian for the world was adopted in 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in Washington DC. Twenty-five countries were represented and voted to adopt the Meridian at Greenwich as the Prime Meridian for the world. It was also agreed that longitude would be measured in two directions from the Prime Meridian, 'east longitude being plus and west longitude being minus.'
In 1960, shortly after the transfer of the Royal Greenwich Observatory to Herstmonceux (and, later, Cambridge), Flamsteed House was transferred to the National Maritime Museum's care and over the next ten years the remaining buildings on the site were also transferred. Here the collections of scientific, especially astronomical, instruments has continued to grow. Following the closure of the RGO at Cambridge in October 1998, the site is now known as the Royal Observatory Greenwich.
So, it was an internationally agreed meridian, not an imperically imposed one.
One of the main reasons why Greewich was chosen over its rivals (including the French alternative of a meridian running through the centre of the Eiffel Tower) was that Greenwich time was widely used worldwide by many industries.
Most notably, it was the standard time by which all US railroads ran their timetables. Rather than adopting yet another time system, the railroad operators preferred sticking to their existing standard for obvious reasons (familiarity and cost).
Perhaps, next time, you'll check the historical facts before you start giving history lessons.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
"Am I on Candid Camera?"
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
And after all
You're my renderwall....
Thank you Chicago -- Goodnight!
In ten years, you can get a 120 Terabyte drive. Only one problem: What the hell would you put on it to fill it up?
MS Windows XP 8. Duh.
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