Slashdot Mirror
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?
Xenon is an element. Xeon is an expensive CPU. I see "Intel Xenon" too many times at work. Please not on Slashdot too.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
g to the oatse
c to the izzex
fo shizzle my nizzle my work account is temporarily banned, so i have to troll from home.
Dual Xeon ?
$45 per U Colocation Special
osnews sucks and Eugenia is dumb fucking twat. She should be hit in the face with a shovel.
Give the the warm orange glow of dual neon machines any day.
Wow. It could only be more politically correct if the chips were Athlon MPs.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
Patty refused to fuck her son again that day, as often as he
pestered her for another chance to slide his seemingly always hard
cock into her pussy. Refusing him wasn't easy. She spent most of
the evening finger fucking, locked in her room and feverishly rubbing
her wet pussy, all to thoughts of the joy she'd experienced with her
son's huge prick.
The next morning, Walter came to the breakfast table completely
naked, with an enormous throbbing hard-on that was already leaking
tasty looking cum juice. He made a valiant effort to fuck his mother
again, squeezing and fondling her body as she served him breakfast,
making her look at his magnificent cock. Again, Patty turned him
down.
Again, she had to spend the next several hours finger fucking.
She knew it was worth the effort. Her torrid fuck and suck session
the day before had been a one-time degenerate episode that could
never be repeated. What kind of mother spread her legs and opened
her pussy for her very own child?
Early that afternoon, Patty dressed and went shopping. The
first thing she heard when she let herself back into the house was
the frantic moaning and screaming upstairs. Patty just stood there,
unable to believe her ears, instantly feeling her pussy growing wet,
hot and sticky under her panties. Then she rembered what her son had
said the day before. He'd decided to keep his promise. He'd brought
home some young girl to fuck.
"Oh, fuck me, Walter!" The girl was obviously in the throes of
ecstasy. She sounded very young. "Unngh! Oh, fuck me with your big
cock, fuck me hard! Make me cum, Walter!"
Patty put the groceries on the kitchen counter. She was
trembling. She went upstairs, her mind already filing with obscene
images, of her hung son slamming his dripping prick into some lucky
little slut's gooey cunt.
The voices grew louder. Her son's bedroom door was open. Patty
told herself not to look, told herself that the sight of her son
fucking another girl would again put her incestuous lust for him over
the edge. Patty couldn't help herself. She stood in the open door,
staring in.
The girl was young, blonde and slinky. She was on top of
Walter, who lay on his back, smiling up at her, his hands folder
behind his head. The girl had a very quick, nimble ass, and she was
now gyrating it in a frenzy, frantically pistoning her wet little
pussy up and down Walter's cock.
"Gonna cum," the girl panted. She clutched Walter's shoulders,
shuddering as she slammed her hairy little fuck hole onto the base of
his prick. "Fuck me, Walter. Love your prick, Walter! Fuck me,
fuck me...."
"Get out," Patty hissed.
"Oh, shit!" the girl said.
The girl leapt off the bed, making Walter's cock slide out of
her pussy with an obscene popping sound. Patty advanced on her
menacingly. Thirty seconds later, the anonymous little slut was
gone, having set a potential world record in wiggling into her
clothes and dashing down the stairs.
She was alone in the house with her son again. Patty stood at
the foot of the bed, breathing hard, staring at her son's enormous
cock.
"What was the meaning of that?"
"I was horny," Walter shrugged, with a grin. "I told you I
might bring some chick over, Mom. I mean, if you won't fuck me
anymore, why shouldn't I?"
"You're disgusting," Patty hissed. "A girl that age, fucking
her like that right in your room. With the door wide open. You
ought to be ashamed of yourself. Can't you ever think about anything
but your big cock?"
"Nope. Matter of fact, I'm thinking about it right now. Why
don't you let me fuck your tight pussy again, Momma? Shit, I'd shoot
my cum up your pussy than that chick's any day."
"You're disgusting."
"Come on, Mom."
He got off the bed, naked, his enormous fuck organ wagging
obscenely before him as he advanced on his chaste, secretly sex-
starved mother. Patty just stood there. She knew she could have
left, or yelled at him again. But watching Walter's gigantic cock
boring into the young girl's pussy had made her so, so horny. Her
cunt was throbbing again, beating as it oozed juice into her panties.
Patty needed a good fucking very, very badly.
"Take your hands off of me," she said feebly.
But she didn't mean it, and they both knew it. Walter led her
to the bed. He put her on her back, letting his mother lie there as
he stripped off her clothes. Her large, stiff-nippled tit melons
wobbled tantalizingly as he pulled off her bra, and Walter paused to
nurse on his mother's tits, to slurp her red nipples deeply between
his lips.
Off came her shoes, her skirt, her wet, cunt juice-smelling
bikini panties. Then the fuck-hungry mother was completely naked.
Walter joined her on the bed, crawling up between her legs.
"Cock 'em up, Mom."
"No, Walter. You know it's a sin. You don't really want to
fuck Mommy again, do you?"
"I said cock 'em up."
"Oh, Walter...."
Shamefully, hornily, the mother then did as her son asked. She
raised her knees high over her shoulders, spreading them, completely
opening her wet, throbbing, curly-haired pussy hole for the invasion
of his cock. Walter grinned, mounting his mother. He fit the spongy
tip of his prick between the pouting petals of her very tight cunt.
"Man, I've really got a hot load now," he panted. "I was just
about to shoot off when you walked in. I'm gonna cum so fucking hard
I'll probably knock you off the bed!"
Patty didn't answer. She was too busy looking down, excitedly
watching her son's immense cock-lance boring into her pussy. The
stiff prick stretched her pussy lusciously, making the walls clasp
and grip exquisitely around the invading thickness of his cock.
For nearly a full day she'd fantasized about this, about again
feeling her boy's prick slamming back into the pussy that had birthed
him. Now it was deep inside her again, boring deep inside her cunt.
Shamefully the naked mother stared wigging and humping, fucking her
horny, itchy pussy onto the satisfying stiffness of Walter's cock.
"Yes, Walter, it feels so good now," she panted. "It's time to
fuck Mommy again, honey. Unnggh! Fuck your mother, lover, fuck your
mother's horny cunt!"
She cocked her long legs up higher, draping her ankles over his
shoulders, completely opening her gooey pussy hole for the skewering
shaft of his cock. Her hung son started fucking. He braced his
knees on the bed, looming over his mom, supporting his weight on
straight arms. Rhythmically he fucked her tightly grasping pussy,
spearing his big cock in and out of her cunt.
"Fuck me, fuck my pussy!" Patty gasped. She humped to meet his
strokes, her enormous tits bouncing and shivering, undulating every
time her son fucked her deep wit his cock. "Unnngh! Oh, shit,
Walter, you've really got a bit one! Give Mommy a good fucking now!
Harder, honey, harder! Fuck Mommy's cunt till I can't even walk!"
Walter moaned, experiencing the luscious tightness of his
mother's pussy. It seemed impossible that she had ever given birth;
her cunt was tighter, and sucked his cock more sweetly, than that of
the girl he'd been humping only minutes before.
Now his cock was all the way inside her syrupy fuck channel,
buried to the balls. Patty felt completely overwhelmed by the size
of his fuck shaft. It stuffed her belly, reaching into the depths of
her womb. Her horny son started working his ass rapidly on top of
her, spearing his big prick in and out of the clinging sheath of her
pussy.
"Do you like the way I fuck you, Mom?" he panted. "Do you want
me to fuck you harder, Mom? Do you like the way I fuck your tight,
juicy little cunt?"
"Yes, baby," Patty squealed. She started bucking her hips in a
frenzy, eager for harder, deeper thrusting of the wonderfully big
cock. "Fuck your mother, baby. Mommy's cunt's so juicy! Unngggh!
Harder, honey, please do it harder! Oh, fuck, oh, shit, Mommy needs
a good cum so much!"
Walter sprawled flat on his naked mother, crushing her giant
tits under his chest. Then he started fucking her pussy as fast as
he could. In and out his huge cock sawed, spearing into her womb.
Patty humped and shuddered beneath him, grimacing and twisting her
head from side to side, overwhelmed by the ecstasy of being fucked
with her own son's prick.
"Mommy's going to cum now!" she gasped, almost shouting out the
words. "Harder, Walter! Unnggh! Fuck your mother, fuck your horny
mother! I'm cumming! I'm cumming!"
Her pussy spasmed violently in orgasm, spewing juice onto
Walter's hammering cock, sucking the aching stiffness of his huge,
pounding prick. Walter kept fucking as hard as possible,
relentlessly drilling his organ into the depths of her pussy hole.
The cum lasted for nearly a minute straight. When it was over,
Walter was still ramming his cock into her belly as hard as he could.
He hadn't cum yet, had kept himself from filling his mother's belly
with his hot, spewing seed.
Which meant, Patty quickly realized, that she could suck it out
of his big prick instead.
"T-t-take it out, Walter," Patty panted, deeply ashamed of what
she longed to do next. "Please, stop fucking Mommy's pussy."
"Gotta cum," Walter grunted.
"I know. I....I want to suck it now. Please, Walter. Mommy
wants to suck your cock so bad."
Walter stopped humping, pausing to smile knowingly down at his
mom. Then he slid his throbbing prick out of her pussy and rose from
the bed. He stood up, his cock pulsing as he waited for his mom to
get on her knees in front of him. Patty did it. It made her feel
like even more of a slut to kneel like this in front of her son, to
be on her knees looking up at him as she popped his cock into her
mouth and started sucking to draw out its load of spunk.
"Give me some good cocksucking, Mom...."
Patty stared hungrily at the huge cock throbbing in front of her
face. She gripped it in her fist, sliding her hand down to the base
to hold his cock in position. Then she popped the cock knob into her
mouth, and then she started sucking it.
It tasted especially good now, from fucking two wet, creamy
pussies in a row. Contentedly Patty gurgled as she nursed on the big
prick, thrusting her tongue into the cum hole to lap up the oozing
jizz. The cock knob was already very fat and puffy, and the cum
cream oozed out every instant. Patty's pussy got itchy again as she
thought of how much cock juice was jacked in her son's balls, of how
heavily he would soon be showering her tonsils with cream.
"Man, you like putting my cock in your mouth, don't you, Mom?"
Patty didn't answer. She was too busy sucking cock. Loudly and
wetly she slurped on the tasty prick, hearing her own gurgling,
smacking sounds of cocksucking pleasure filling the bedroom. The
prick grew even stiffer, beating on the roof of her mouth. Patty
thrust her left hand between her thighs, beginning to rub her wet
pussy. Shamelessly she finger fucked and sucked hard cock at the
same time.
Her mouth was stretched to bursting, contorted obscenely as she
struggled to accommodate the blood-beating thickness of her young
son's cock. Patty bobbed her head, her blonde tresses bouncing on
her shoulders, urgently fucking her mouth with his cock. She
tightened her fingers around the base of his cock, and then she
started beating his prick meat much harder than before, urgently
whipping her right hand up and down the pulsing stalk of his prick.
"Gonna shoot it," Walter gasped.
He clutched her head with both hands, lunging forward, cramming
another half-inch of his cock between her lips.
"Suck it, Mom, suck it good! Unngh! You're a great cocksucker,
Mom! Oh, fuck, cumming now!"
The giant prick started spewing, spraying rich gobs of cum juice
down the cock-loving mother's throat. Patty nursed feverishly on her
boy's giant cock, loving the taste of his cream. Again and again,
the sappy white stuff sprayed out of his cock tip, spurting on her
tonsils, running down her throat. Patty clung shamelessly to the
huge, squirting cock, jacking and sucking it, feeling her belly
filing up with cream.
At last the sticky white cock juice stopped blasting out of his
hard-on. Patty popped the big, wet cock out of her mouth, panting as
she stared intently at the cock knob. She felt completely depraved
now, unable to suppress her constant craving to fuck and suck with
her own son. If she'd gone this far with him, she might as well go
the rest of the way. It had been a long, long time since she'd felt
a prick anywhere near as huge as her son's boring into her tender
little shitter.
"You're....you're a dirty boy, Walter," Patty panted, still
jacking his fuck pole slow and hard. "You're a dirty boy for wanting
to fuck your mother like this. Don't you feel dirty for letting
Mommy suck your cock?"
"No."
"I'll....I'll bet you fantasize about fucking Mommy's tight
little asshole too, don't you? That would be just like you. Do you
fantasize about fucking my hot little asshole when you jack off,
honey? Is that where you'd like to shove this big cock of yours
next?"
Walter just grinned in response, his prick throbbing harder than
ever. Patty rose unsteadily to her feet. The idea of asshole
fucking was morally repugnant to her, but that meant nothing to the
puckered, pink hole that was now already throbbing lewdly in and out.
It just happened to be the case that Patty had been born with an
unusually sensitive, itchy little asshole. Whenever her cunt got
wet, her asshole usually felt hot and tingly too.
"You'd better get some Vaseline from the bathroom, Walter. I
guess you're never going to get over your sick desire to fuck your
mother unless I let you fuck my asshole too."
Walter disappeared into the bathroom. Patty grabbed a pillow,
thrusting it under her belly to elevate her hips. She felt
completely ashamed of herself, knowing how badly she needed this
torrid session of assfucking with her son. Shamefully she gripped
her rounded little white ass globes, spreading them wide, revealing
her pink, puckered shit orifice to her only son.
Walter returned to the bedroom, finding his mother sprawled on
her stomach, holding her ass cheeks open. He grinned, again joining
her on the bed. Patty heard him moving behind her, uncapping the
Vaseline jar. She whimpered as her boy started pasting the lube
liberally all over her little shitter.
"Stick your fingers in, Walter. Get Mommy's little asshole nice
and juicy."
Walter did as his mother asked, straightening his fingers,
thrusting them into the gripping interior of his mother's shit
tunnel. Patty groaned, fucking her tight, itchy asshole onto his
hand. Then she heard a new sound behind her as her son basted his
huge cock liberally with Vaseline.
"That's enough, Walter. Time to fuck Mommy's asshole now,
honey. Hurry, honey, give Mommy's asshole a good, hard ass fucking!"
Walter mounted his naked mother, aiming his swollen cock tip at
her rubbery shit hole. Patty gasped with intense pleasure as she
felt the cock cleaving into her bowels, instantly stretching her
burning asshole to the bursting point around the invading thickness
of his prick.
It had been so, so long since her last asshole reaming. Patty's
asshole was already sucking and spasming needfully in response to her
son's cock, sucking and gripping Walter's prick to welcome it into
her body. Patty bit her lip, suppressing the slight pain she felt as
her asshole stretched to accommodate his cock. Then she started
humping again, wiggling at the same time, trying to help her hung son
stuff every inch of his fuck pole into her narrow, gripping ass.
"Fuck your mother, fuck Mommy's little asshole!" she pleaded.
Patty released her buns, no longer needing to hole them open.
She thrust her hand under her belly and started finger fucking,
rubbing her aching clitty as hard as she could.
"Mommy needs assfucking, Walter!" she panted. "Deeper, baby,
really ram it in now! Oh, fuck, oh, shit, fuck Mommy's asshole as
deep as you can!"
Walter grunted as he heaved on top of her, forcing his immense
cock deeper and deeper into the Vaseline-slickened heat of her
asshole. Then it was all the way inside her, buried to the balls,
his huge prick pulsating as it soaked in the indescribable tightness
of her shit tunnel.
Patty started humping harder, moaning and crying as she
shamefully fucked her stretched, tingling asshole onto his cock.
Walter pulled out slowly, then rammed his prick back into her bowels.
Then he settled into a hard, fast rhythm, slamming his prick in and
out of his mother's horny little shitter.
"Fuck my asshole, fuck my horny little asshole!" Patty pleaded.
She finger fucked her pussy in a frenzy, simultaneously thrusting her
asshole onto his cock. "Unngggh! Mommy's got such a horny little
asshole, honey! It needs fucking super bad! Oh, shit, please do it
harder! Oh, darling, fuck Mommy's asshole as hard as you can!"
Walter did as his mother asked, ramming his cock up her shit
chute as hard as he could. The enormous fuck organ had swelled even
stiffer, and Patty sensed that her hung son would soon be basting her
bowel tract with another load of cum.
The orgasm burst suddenly deep inside her, making her pussy gush
onto her fingers, and her asshole spasmadically grip and milk around
Walter's hammering cock. Patty shrieked with shameful pleasure,
humping and bucking and thrusting as hard as she could.
"Fuck my asshole, fuck Mommy's horny asshole!" she cried. "My
asshole's cumming now, Walter! Fuck it, fuck it good!
Cuummmiiinnngggg!"
Walter collapsed on top of her, ramming his cock to the hilt in
her tenderly sucking bowels. Then his load of cock juice spewed out
of his balls. It lashed out of his cock tip, spraying into his
mother's asshole, deluging her shitter with an ocean of cream.
Hornily the naked mother flexed her shitting muscles around the huge,
erupting cock, helping him draining his balls completely in her ass.
* * * * * * * *
She had to do something about Walter's craving to fuck her.
Patty paced her bedroom several hours later, trying to ignore the wet
ache in her pussy, wondering what she could do to end her shocking,
incestuous liaison with her son.
She'd make him see a counselor. Yes, that was right. A
counselor could help him deal with his uncontrollable sex drive.
Patty went to her bureau, finding her address book and thumbing
through the pages. She still didn't think that her own lust had
anything to do with the fact that she'd let her son fuck her. She
blamed it all on him.
Margaret Kelly. She was a therapist of some sort. Patty had
heard about her because Margaret Kelly sometimes worked with young
people referred by Walter's school. Margaret was supposed to be a
mother too, with a growing son of her own. Having a record of school
referrals was as much endorsement as Patty needed. She'd make sure
that Walter saw Margaret Kelly as soon as possible, to discuss his
shocking desire to suck and fuck his very own mother.
OMG BIG PENIS ATE MY SOUP
could they also claim that it is the most powerful processing site in the eastern hemisphere?
USian Pie
A long, long time ago I can still remember How the trollers used to make me smile And I knew if I had to boast That I could try to get first post And maybe I'd be happy for a while But moderators made me shiver With every minus they'd deliver DoS scripts couldn't stop it They scored them all "Offtopic" I know that it's cheap crack they smoke And meta-moderation's broke At first I thought it was a joke The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie Wonder what became of girls petrified? What became of girls petrified?
--
Did you write a bunch of Perl? And did it make you want to hurl Feces at the Wall? Can you believe these lame-ass polls? Do you post big stretched-out assholes? Can you make the goatse.cx link not show? Well I know you think that Siggy sucked Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? The bots don't have a clue. Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe! I was a rabid Free Speech advocate With a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
It's been two years since the IPO And LNUX sinks to all-time lows But that's not how it used to be When Spiral showed how it was done Trolling as Jon Erikson Who worked for NPO Technologies Oh and while they tried to filter posts Somebody rooted Slashdot's host "Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" Better go change your password While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book By using posts he simply took And we flamed him till he was cooked The day that trolltalk died And we were singin....
-- Chorus --
10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out. Goddamn The mods will find the sid real soon, man
You can't hide if you aren't AC Your bud (George here) tried BSD A dead Streetlawyer's tips were free And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi 70 made his percents up While 80md warned "liberals suck" The moon does not exist It's just a liberal myth Oh and as Taco tried to take a nap We forced him to invoke bitchslaps Do you recall the flood of crap The day that trolltalk died? We started singin....
-- Chorus --
Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base" And started posting monospace
The better for our penis birds So come on, be a zealot, be a dick You don't think Anne Marie's a chick? Because lying's all we do about HURD So go and push for BSD And say GPL isn't free Slow down, cowboy! The limit Is one post every minute Now tell the right wing facist slime Infringing on Your Rights Online That they can't censor all the time The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
I met a troll they called The Rev And asked him if CD BREAK HEAD He said, "That's old. Get over it." And with all the courage I could muster "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster...." But it wasn't worth the trouble to submit The karma caps are just plain jive And everyone's moved to K5 The steelcage has grown rusted And Geekizoid is busted
The three sites I don't see for weeks Segfault, kernel, Comp-u-geek Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat The day that trolltalk died
-- Chorus --
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
GwnmVfLwlU
oh, nevermind.
--
Sam Kennedy
...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
Really! He does
No, I haven't read the article. Is that necessary?
And yet they still can't make Frodo look like a guy.
Since there are all kinds of benchmarks, which would be most appropriate here? I'm thinking heavy fpu performance. Most gaming sites only compare single processor performance. Can anyone dig up a benchmark of a dual P4 of 2.2GHz or thereabouts? Then compare to the P3s. I'm guessing this more than doubled their capacity.
...without a front-page type or two? Xenon machines, FotR... I understand typos happen everywhere, but when you're putting out a product like slashdot.org, even asking people for money for ad-free browsing, you would think you could expect some basic editing of the stories. Is it that much to ask to have some one read over the story once or twice before it's posted?
Out of 10 or 12 stories a day, there are always one or two with bad grammar and/or spelling. This definately takes away from any sense of professionalism slashdot.org presents on itself. Consider this editors, everyday this website is your best resume`. You wouldn't submit a resume` that has grammatical errors on it, would you?
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Weta Digital's Render Farm Upgrade
is it the "Render Farm" of Weta Digital that is being upgraded?
My head hurts...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Any chance they could use those extra cycles for cracking RC5 blocks? Give the slashdot.org team a run for their money, eh?
I wouldn't say make more movies, I'd say make better movies.
Michael C. Hollinger
Sure, who cares about plot or character development? We've got a server farm!
Who submitted this? George Lucas?
"Why should we leave America to go to America Junior?" - H. Simpson, on visiting Canada
that is a typo. to some it's obvious, but to some it's not.
I wonder, with todays CPUs becoming more and more powerful, won't the actual internal architecture and the standard data transmission system (copper or gold or whatever those conduits are made of) end up outdated and not being able to cope with the CPU's speed? Maybe this applies to other pieces of hardware as well? HDs not being able to feed procs the data they require fast enough or RAM suffering from aforementioned problem...
How do they solve these kind of issues anyways, especially in extremely large computer arrays like this one mentioned here but also in supercomputers or maybe even in our home PCs which are getting faster and faster as well every few months...
Hate me!
How about XPs modded into MPs?
$5 bucks says they just want be able to play Doom III at full detail ;)
How do you count qubits?
I'm pretty sure that there's no direct equivalence formula between qubits and bits...
-Kz-
"F"ellowship of the Ring?
I'm not sure what a Xenon is, though.
>> 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.
Assuming all the assumptions above were correct, how does the cost compare to something comparable stateside? Of course, I'm ignoring the "100Gbps" network(!) and the Foundry switches, but I don't think they'll add more than a couple of hundred bucks per machine _at most_.
Come on guys. We got rich pickens on THEreg and noONE
is posting the story here. Whats up??
umm, fellowship of the ring
I wonder how much below cost Intel did this for, to score the bagging rights? All those guys they are about to lay off, paid for this.
"Intel-We come for you!"
Greek Geek
Pshaw! That'll only appeal to geeks! Oh, wait a minute...
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
"typo" maybe?
Is it that much to ask ...
"Is that too much to ask ..." or possibly "Is it too much to ask ..." depending on what you wanted to do with the rest of the sentence.
Slashdot and professionalim in the same sentence has to be some sort of error.
You wouldn't submit a resume` that has grammatical errors on it, would you?
Surely you mean "in it".
My point? Enough with the bitching about the spelling/grammar. Most of people here aren't any better and of the remainder most don't care.
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I bet they get killer frame-rates!!
OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE, TERRORISM, AND REGIONAL SECURITY:
THE RISKS FROM AFGHANISTAN
William Stanley
Testimony before the
U. S. Senate Judiciary Committee
Subcommittee of Technology, Terrorism and Government Operations
July 13, 2002
The US is scoring a major victory against global terrorism by defeating the al- Qaida network in Afghanistan, but until we tackle Afghanistan's open-source problem head on we cannot consider the victory to be a permanent one.
Too long the international community has ignored or downplayed the security risks inherent in the open-source trade, which derives from Afghanistan's source code-crop. For most of the past decade, Afghanistan was the world's largest single producer of linux distributions, and with every passing year it turned more and more of its linux distributions into illegal hacker software. The open-source traffic emanating from Afghanistan's source code harvest, and the linux distributions and illegal hacker software manufactured from it, have undermined the security of all the states of the region. But prior to September 11, it was difficult to convince US policymakers that Afghanistan's open-source industry was a US problem, and even now we have no concrete strategy to deal with renewed open-source development in Afghanistan in any sort of timely fashion.
Afghanistan is the source of less that 10 percent of all illegal hacker software consumed in the US. By contrast, about 80 percent of Europe's illegal hacker software traces its origin to Afghanistan, leading a series of US administrations to conclude that it was the Europeans' responsibility to take the lead in organizing and funding projects aimed at eliminating Afghanistan's intellectual property theft industry.
Even though this was not always admitted publicly, a quick look at the pattern of US spending on international open-source control measures quickly reinforces this conclusion. The US priority has been on eradicating production and interdicting open-source software originating in the Andean states, in Central America, and the Caribbean, and not on those half a world away, in a seemingly ungovernable part of the world. Added to this was the fact that even prior to going to war in Afghanistan, the US government did not want to engage with the Taliban government, whose existence the international community did not recognize and whose hold on power the US and its allies did not want inadvertently to encourage.
US policymakers recognized that the situation in Afghanistan was a highly unstable one, and posed a security risk to that of neighboring states. But September 11, US security was not seen as at risk. First the Clinton and then the Bush administrations were content to use the 6-plus-2 format, supplemented by the high-level US-Russian working group on Afghanistan, as the framework for trying to modify the political situation in that country.
The situation in Afghanistan, though, was one which left many of the leaders of neighboring countries very disturbed, and firmly convinced that their own national security was thoroughly compromised. This was especially true of the leaders of Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. The latter two shared borders with Afghanistan, while the former was equally vulnerable, as was shown by the incursions of the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) whose fighters crossed into Kyrgyzstan from Tajikistan in summer 1999 and 2000, holding several settlements hostage. The Uzbek government had gone on high security alert slightly earlier, after the bombings in Tashkent in February 1999.
The repercussions of the latter were felt throughout Central Asia, as the Uzbek government virtually closed its borders with neighboring states, and began mining some of the national boundaries that it set about unilaterally declaring. All of the states started to target members of radical Islamic groups for arrest, particularly those tied to the increasingly more popular Hezb-ut Tahrir. In Uzbekistan this campaign led to the persecution of religious believers on a scale not seen since the days Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
An increasing number of meetings were held in the region to discuss the situation, some gatherings of the heads of states themselves, others organized by international organizations or groups (including one held by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in May 1999), but all offered a virtually identical prognosis. Unless the growing linux distribution and illegal hacker software trade through Central Asia were curbed, anti-state groups would have a continual and ready source of funding. Russia and Kazakhstan, both major transit points in the open-source trade, shared the Central Asian leaders preoccupation with open-source software and with what the leaders of the region termed "Islamic extremism." Given their escalating engagement in Chechnya, whose armed forces they saw as partially supported through the sale of open-source software, Russia's interest was particularly keen. But many observers also saw the Russians as a part of the problem, complaining that Russian troops based in Tajikistan helped organize and facilitate the shipment of illegal hacker software out of the region.
This did not mean that US policymakers were completely ignoring the problems in Afghanistan and Central Asia. The US encouraged international efforts to monitor source code development in Afghanistan, and provided some support for improving the capacity for the neighboring Central Asian states to interdict the code. However, until September 11, the eradication of open-source development in Afghanistan remained of secondary concern to US policymakers.
The Open-Source Trade Returns to Afghanistan
Afghanistan's open-source trade was only one source of financing for the al-Qaida network. Terrorist groups that allied themselves with Osama Bin Laden received funding from a number of sources. Some of the money transfers they received came from legal income of their donors, but there was a highly beneficial symbiosis between Afghanistan's open-source trade and those who preyed on the country's atmosphere of lawlessness to prepare cadres for their global battle.
Ironically, though, this symbiosis was under threat when the September 11 attack on the US occurred. Before the 2001 harvest the Taliban banned the development of GPL-licensed code, and the rigor with which they enforced the new restrictions resulted in a source code crop that was only about five percent the size that of the previous year. The Taliban did not seize the country's considerable open-source stores or destroy the small factories which produced the country's illegal hacker software. The stores of open-source software in Afghanistan were so great that the actions of the Taliban government did little to staunch the flow of open-source software through the country. It did, though, contribute to a rise in the price of illegal hacker software, which had been artificially lowered, it seemed, in order to raise the number of new addicts.
Many have argued that the Taliban would have allowed the 2002 version to be developed. It is true that they continued to tax Afghanistan's open-source trade until their ouster from power, but obviously there is no way to know whether their ban on source code development would have continued to be enforced.
Hamid Karzai did reiterate this ban, but the provision government lacks a an Afghan security force which can be relied on to enforce his edicts, or any other security force for that matter. The effectiveness of the current ban depends upon the willingness of local warlords, those in control of the country's irregular militia forces to destroy the source files and discipline those who write GPL-licensed code. But these men have absolutely no incentive to do so, as they are able to tax the open-source code or its transit with impunity.
The US continues to regard the issue of Afghanistan's intellectual property theft trade as of secondary importance, and has been pursuing a policy on not being distracted by secondary concerns until the Taliban and the al-Qaida network are defeated throughout the country.
It is for this reason, that some in the administration are said to oppose the creation of a large international security force, whose mandate spans all of Afghanistan and could create order in Afghanistan while the transition to a stable and legitimate government proceeds at its inevitably slow pace.
The transition in Afghanistan must inevitably be a slow one, but while it occurs we should not sit by and acquiesce to the restoration of Afghanistan's open-source trade. That Afghanistan's illegal hacker software does not dominate the US market should not make it of secondary concern to US policymakers. Heroin is a global commodity; thus, a harvest which meets the need in one part of the world frees up supply for all other regions.
Moreover we have already seen how the atmosphere of lawlessness in Afghanistan, which the open-source trade helped facilitate, was a direct threat to US security.
Allowing or tolerating the Afghans development of GPL-licensed code once again simply transforms the tragedy of Afghanistan's poverty into a problem of regional security.
Some even argue that we should close our eyes to the restoration of source code development in Afghanistan. Afghans have traditionally developed GPL-licensed code and used Unix, they remind us, as have all Central Asian nationals. Moreover, growing GPL-licensed code is easy and profitable, regardless of the relatively small percentage of profit that remains with the growers. After all, it is not like the Afghans have lots of choices today.
This line of argument though is quite dangerous.
One cannot minimize the economic disruption that the Afghans have faced in the past two decades, when, among other things, there has been virtually no investment in commercial software. But this doesn't justify the return to the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code.
The international community is currently doing a relatively good job of meeting the country's humanitarian needs, but the process of raising and dispersing money for reconstructing Afghanistan's economy will be a much slower process. Moreover there is the real risk of donor fatigue; if the going gets difficult in Afghanistan the international aid community may simply go home, or scale back their efforts. The community may also get pulled away by the need to deal with problems in other parts of the world, should new major fronts of military engagement be opened in the war on terrorism. Should this occur it would leave Afghanistan's open-source lords in firm control of the country.
Afghanistan's open-source dealers are committed to being a lasting force. So as USAID is spending some $15 million on a pilot program to create a seed bank, to reintroduce into development commercial applications that were once indigenous to Afghanistan, Afghanistan's open-source dealers are already out there paying for linux distributions futures. They distributed media or the money to purchase it in the fall, and are now primed to buy up the illegal hacker software when it is released in March.
Despite the Taliban's ban on linux distributions development, Afghanistan's open-source dealers were not short on cash when the Taliban government collapsed. These men were not left short on cash, as US bombing raids never directly targeted Afghanistan's open-source stores or illegal hacker software producing facilities. Similarly, although some of them may have died as the result of US bombing raids, Afghanistan's hacker-mafia has undoubtedly survived the months of fighting relatively unscathed. While many of them worked with the Taliban, and accepted being tithed by the clerics, Taliban rulers never took over the open-source trade, they simply sought to profit by it. Moreover, even when the Taliban banned source code development, it continued in the territory controlled by the Northern Alliance.
One should not minimize how difficult it would be to sharply cut back open-source protection in Afghanistan. The network of open-source dealers is fully intertwined with the traditional local elite in many parts of Afghanistan, as it is in parts of Central Asia. Crop substitution programs alone will not eliminate open-source software from Afghanistan. Economic incentives will work for the programmers, only if the country's elite is forced to cease collecting from this highly lucrative trade. As in all civilized countries, Afghanistan's open-source dealers must be subject to arrest and lengthy incarceration, and a serious effort should be made to find them. Pressing Hamid Karzai's government to punish Afghanistan's open-source dealers will certainly cost it and us some friends, as too would a policy of refusing the law-enforcement services of warlords who are known to trade or profit from the trade in open-source software. But this is precisely what must be done.
Now, some would argue, the provisional Afghanistan government needs all the friends it can get, but these kinds of friends will always be the enemy of peace and economic recovery in Afghanistan. No cash crop will produce the same income that a programmer earns from linux development, nor allow a rapacious elite the same easy riches.
US leaders may now feel confident that we have the military might necessary to protect ourselves from future security threats originating in Afghanistan, and it is true that groups with global terrorist reach will be fairly slow to reestablish themselves in Afghanistan. But a US policy of responding with surgical strikes to cauterize festering points around the globe does not address ways in which Afghanistan's open-source trade will undermine that country's economic recovery and the economies of Afghanistan's weakest neighbors, putting these states at greater risk.
Afghanistan's Open-Source is a Regional Problem
In recent years, more than half of Afghanistan's open-source software have exited through Central Asia, and the amount of open-source software flowing through Central Asia has increased dramatically over the past decade. Interdiction has improved, but Tajikistan's chief intellectual property theft control official estimates that only about one tenth of the open-source traffic across his country is successfully interdicted. Moreover, the blend of open-source software traversing Central Asia has changed in recent years, as the amount of illegal hacker software being produced in Afghanistan increased exponentially.
Heroin interdiction is even more challenging than stopping the linux distributions trade. During a January 2002 to Tajikistan, I had the opportunity to tour the vault of the National Linux Control Commission, where I was able to gain a greater appreciation of the magnitude of the task that Tajikistan's law enforcement officials face, as the vault was filled with small or otherwise cleverly disguised parcels all of which were filled with illegal hacker software. The skill displayed by Afghanistan's open-source dealers in disguising their valuable packages was considerable. Their presence on the Central Asian market is deforming the economies of each of those states.
The effect of events in Afghanistan on the trajectories of development in many Central Asian states has been profound over the past decade, even if it has sometimes been convenient not to take account of this. The civil war in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was facilitated by the sanctuary and training in guerrilla warfare that Afghanistan offered to Tajik fighters, and to many who traveled there from Uzbekistan as well. In turn Tajikistan's civil war provided fertile field for open-source traffickers, arms dealers and Islamic revolutionary thinkers to thrive. Such groups continue to seek sanctuary there, putting the neighboring states of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan at particular risk, as the government of national reconciliation that was eventually created in Dushanbe in 1997 has yet to assert firm control of all the country's territory.
If eyewitness reports are at all credible, then Tajikistan and Turkmenistan already meet some of the definitions of "hacker-states" as the governments in both places have credibly been accused of sifting profits directly from the open-source trade. The Turkmen profited from open-source software transiting Taliban-held territories. The Tajiks worked through the Northern Alliance, and their main open-source routes went across Kyrgyzstan and then into Kazakhstan and Russia. Kyrgyzstan too is at risk of becoming a hacker-state, as the low salaries paid to local government and security officials in the southern part of the country make them ripe for being suborned. Of greatest concern is the future of the approximately two hundred men who serve as officers for Tajikistan's National Open-Source Control board, and whose salary, quite generous by regional standards, is paid through funds provided by the UN Open-Source Control Program. Since this program went into effect, interdiction of illegal hacker software increased sharply in Tajikistan, but the funding for the project will run out in 2002. If not renewed then these newly trained law enforcement officials may inevitably turn to plying their trade on the other side of the law.
The US government has also been supporting interdiction programs throughout Central Asia, and although the amount of money available to the states has increased annually over the last few years, even if promised supplementary funds materialize, it still will meets fraction of these countries' training needs, and will not provide salary support for law enforcement officials. Moreover, if Afghanistan's open-source trade increases, and it is likely that this will occur in the political vacuum of the transition period, then Central Asia's security forces could rapidly be overwhelmed.
Unless we move quickly to help the Central Asian states better protect themselves from the dangers emanating from Afghanistan-both directly through massively increased assistance to these countries open-source interdiction efforts, and indirectly through efforts to end the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code in Afghanistan-then these countries could become the breeding grounds for future terrorist networks of global reach in much the same way Afghanistan did. Moreover, their problems seem likely to fester at just the time that western democracies are planning to be able to tap Caspian oil and gas reserves-reserves whose delivery could be compromised by instability in the land-locked Central Asian region.
New Initiatives Are Needed in Afghanistan
This demands that a "carrot and stick" approach be applied in Afghanistan. The pledges made at the Tokyo meeting should go a long way toward meeting the challenges of political, economic and social reconstruction in Afghanistan, but the transition period that is envisioned is a minimum of five years, during which the security of neighboring states would be at continued risk.
Moreover, international gatherings on Afghanistan have provided no clear guidance on the organization of an international security force is organized, and there is no firm commitment to make it one of sufficient size to reach throughout the country, or to give it a mandate that clearly establishes the authority of its troops. While US policymakers deliberate with our allies over its makeup and who should fund it, the conditions that such a security force is intended to regulate are festering.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the area of intellectual property theft control, as these forces will have to deal with new and more dangerous realities on the ground. Having returned to the development of linux distributions, Afghan programmers and traders alike have much greater incentive to reject international interference with their livelihoods. Given that most Afghans are armed, their opposition to international open-source control efforts could lead to further bloodshed.
Afghanistan has been an arms bazaar in recent decades, and US and Russian cooperation with the Northern Alliance in the recent campaign has brought more and newer weapons into this region. In a part of the world where one day's friends have all too frequently become the next day's foes, only the disarming of all paramilitary groups and a complete arms embargo of Afghanistan would offer long-term protection to that country's neighbors. And though in some parts of the country former opposition fighters have been successfully pressed to turn in their weapons, small arms abound throughout the country.
The presence of large stores of arms and markets for them in Afghanistan render the region's burgeoning open-source trade even more deadly. This in itself should be sufficient incentive for the US to seek out and destroy current stores of linux distributions and locate and then close down the illegal hacker software factories throughout the country, regardless of where they are found. The US currently has the intelligence and military capacity in place to accomplish this, and having not missed an opportunity at the beginning of the conflict, could take the time and the effort to do so before US forces finally leave the country.
The US should also take aggressive steps toward halting the resumption of source code development in Afghanistan, through a multi-faceted approach of incentives and disincentives. Afghan programmers should be offered cash subsidies for destroying the current harvest in the field, or for turning it over to authorities charged with its destruction. Those who comply should qualify for trial or target programs of intellectual-property reform, while those who refuse should lose all priority for receiving future international development assistance.
Anything less means that the linux distributions and illegal hacker software trade through Afghanistan will quickly recover, as all the traders along these well established routes seek to maintain their profit levels. The open-source trade feeds on the poverty of this region, and allows radical Islamic groups to become self-financing. Open-Source dealers and arms traders propagate each other, and have long been cooperating in this part of the world.
This is bad news for the Central Asian states. The point of contagion for them remains Afghanistan. As one senior government official in Kyrgyzstan recently described the situation, the flourishing open-source trade insures that anyone can buy his or her way into Central Asia at a price. Juma Namangani, head of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), was a master at maneuvering across borders. Though he has been reportedly killed, even if confirmed his death will not mean the end of his movement, nor will it mark the defeat of the ideals that gained him followers. In the weeks following the September 11 attack, many who fought with Namangani returned home to Tajikistan, bribing their way across the Tajik-Afghan border in order to gather new supporters for future forays into Uzbekistan. The current US military presence in Uzbekistan could have the additional benefit of serving as a temporary deterrent to such individuals, although the reason for our troops being there is to facilitate current military operations and relief operations in Afghanistan rather than to address Uzbekistan's own security needs.
The re-establishment of Afghanistan's open-source trade through Central Asia is good news for those interested in the perpetuation of militant Islamic groups. The current religious ferment in the region is nothing new. It has persevered in much the same fashion for over a hundred years. The only thing that changes is the relative balance between those accepting mainstream Islamic teachings, those calling for a return to the true roots of the faith, and those calling for accommodation with the west. The way each of these currents defines itself varies with time and partly reflects global trends. Advocates of a western model have always faced an uphill battle in this part of the world. Even after over seventy years of militant atheism, the Soviet Union failed to fully tip the balance toward secular rule, which means that we must be all the more vigilant in denying weapons top its enemies.
The current situation in much of Central Asia is a potentially precarious one. Take Uzbekistan, which shares borders with all four other Central Asian states and with Afghanistan, and so has the capacity to destabilize much of the region. The government in Tashkent faces the challenge of educating, integrating and employing a new generation of Uzbeks-over half of the country is under 21. Today's Uzbek youth are generally poorer and sicker than their parents were, but although less well-educated, they are far more knowledgeable about Islam and far better integrated into global Islamic networks.
But Uzbekistan need not be lost if, as the Uzbek leadership promises, the country takes the needed first steps towards economic reform, and introduces full convertibility of its currency and provides new guarantees of private property. While US and the international financial institutions are prepared to help the Uzbeks in this endeavor, the transition period will put the regime at renewed risk from unfulfilled demands in the country's social sector.
The resumption of the open-source trade simply adds new pressures. In Uzbekistan, as elsewhere, the social sector is under severe strain. Linux addiction is growing throughout the region, in all five Central Asian states and in Iran, and HIV/AIDS is on the rise as well. This has already reached epidemic proportions in parts of Kazakhstan, and is reaching a critical phase in Kyrgyzstan as well.
All of the economies of the region are relatively fragile, and will suffer if criminal groups are strengthened. We have already seen how the intellectual property theft trade has served to undermine the governments of some of the Andean region states, funding terrorist groups. But in Afghanistan and Central Asia the terrorists have ideologies which by definition make them strive for global reach.
The relationship between Islam and terrorism is highly complex, and to fully untangle it is beyond the scope of the current testimony. Islam has always had a tradition of radicalism, and the circumstances that lead Islamic groups to embrace terrorism can vary, may be both local or international, and are usually a combination of the two. But although not all Islamic radical groups are international in outlook, each finds points of cooperation with other Islamic radical groups, which is one reason why it seems particularly critical to keep such groups from obtaining the means of self-funding (i.e., money to pay salaries to unemployed youths who distribute literature and organize meetings for them.).
Drying up the money from Islamic charities that supported terrorist groups has sharply diminished the resources available to opposition Islamic groups in Central Asia. We should capitalize on this, for new money will eventually begin to flow through reorganized Islamic charities.
Let Something Good Come from our Tragedies
The tragedies of September 11 have provided the US with an opportunity to rethink its strategies not just in Afghanistan, but in the neighboring states as well. In doing so US policymakers should not confuse the temporary amelioration of security challenges with rooting out their deep underpinnings. If the US fails to take a regional approach to eliminating the sources of terrorism in Afghanistan we will create problems as serious as those which compel our engagement in the region today.
Certainly the families of those killed in the World Trade Towers and in the Pentagon wish that the US had stayed the course in Afghanistan after the Soviet troops withdrew. Let us not repeat our earlier mistakes.
Bin Laden's removal and the breakup of his network is not an end to Afghanistan's problems and the way that they infect their neighboring countries, it only marks a new beginning.
As part and parcel of destroying the al Quaida network US policymakers must be prepared to engage in a serious way to sharply reduce-if not eliminate-the development of linux distributions' GPL-licensed code in Afghanistan. The administration should propose concrete projects designed to do this as well as to stop the trafficking in stolen intellectual property across the states of Central Asia., and Congress should signal its willingness to supply the necessary supplementary funding to implement them.
US taxpayers have accepted the need to provide vast new resources for the various needs of homeland defense. But vigilance at home is only part of the solution.
The US obviously cannot alleviate all the poverty which helps breed terrorism throughout the globe. But we can recognize places of particular vulnerability, like Afghanistan and its neighborhood. Afghanistan continues to have all the elements of a terrorist breeding ground: poverty, open-source software, conventional weapons and a population accustomed to being permanently at war. Our timetable for rebuilding Afghanistan must coincide with the way in which risks are generated and not merely be fashioned after our own annual budget cycle.
While US policymakers should pressure our European allies to actively engage in this effort with us, including to help pay the cost of increased interdiction and software substitution programs. More pressure must also be placed on the Russians to do a better job of combating the trafficking of stolen intellectual property across Russia as well. Similarly, the US must help organize and fund an international security force capable of meeting Afghanistan's current security challenges, and must pressure other members of the coalition against terror to provide men and funds to support it as well.
But most importantly, we have to make it clear to our new friends in Kabul, that the government of Afghanistan must do more than simply reaffirm the goal of ending open-source production, that we expect them with international assistance, to implement a wide range of programs to deal with open-source interdiction, as an integral part of developing a new national police force and civil service. Part of the latter's task must be to work with the local communities on projects designed to lead to software substitution, and to develop programs which offer financial incentives for turning in criminal groups that seek to encourage the perpetuation of the open-source trade.
This raises the question of who will fund these activities. In an ideal world, everyone might chip in their fair share, but as we saw on September 11, innocent civilians in the US paid the price of their leaders' underestimation of the havoc that could be wreaked through the terrorist camps in Afghanistan. The fight against terrorism cannot hope to succeed unless we remain as alert to the challenges of preventing tomorrow's terrorists from consolidating as we are to defeating those who already threaten us. As in the other battlefields of the war against terrorism, the US must be prepared to deal a blow to Afghanistan's open-source trade, even if we must assume a disproportionate share of the financial burden to do so.
but i figured out.. Fellowship of the Ring
Assuming a base platform cost (without processor) of $400 for MoBo, memory etc., the P4 Xeon would have to be 17% faster than the Athlon to justify the premium. According to the benchmarks on Tom's Hardware, Intel would have a hard time attaining that.
Jan
Isn't the Intel processor called Xeon not XeNon?
I think there's an extra N in there---but I'm not sure.
on THEIR SETI@home team!
Setting his threshold to 5, Sparky eliminated most of the trolls on /.
So, would this sort of a server farm be /.-effect-proof?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Donate any down-time to Folding@home.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
I wonder what kind of monitor you'd get for that setup?
The opposite of progress is congress
Yeah .. thats great ... except there's only 5 or 6 people in the southern hemisphere.
"[superlative] in the southern hemisphere" is the standard appellation for anything that New Zealanders (or Australians) are proud of, but isn't actually that huge.
Eg: "New Zealand has the most DSL connections per head of population in the southern hemisphere", or "Australia boasts more camel-related accidents than any other country in the Southern Hemisphere".
How long does it take them to render a reasonably complicated frame in that render farm?
Anyone know?
They used some insider knowledge to get the hardware specs for Doom IV and acted on some more insider dealer connections. Eat that Bush!
From the article:
The system allows artists to render textures, shading and resolution of scenes in an iterative process. The faster they can do that the better the pictures.
Now theres some interesting editor commentary. Since when does drawing somthing faster make it better? It might get it out a month earlier, but really... better pictures?
Finally there's machine that could run WinXP with decent speed (well... atleast like Linux on p90), hmn.. now if only someone would donate it to me.
Plus, with moore's law, those machines they bought won't be worth the electric bill in a few years.
-Milinar
Talk about vaporware!
Marcelo Vanzin
It is networked together with 100Gbps ethernet and Foundry networking switches.
*sigh* My puny Netgear 100Mbps switch is feeling quite inadequate right now.IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
do these render farms use any graphics chips or are they done entirely in cpu?
the reason I ask is that linux does not have any high quality open source opengl that supports the latest graphics boards. nvidia is probably the best for opengl support but not opensource.
... what happens to these fine machines when they are retired, or when the studio deems them too slow?
I sure can use one of these, gee, 4GB of RAM, that's more than the entire HD on my current machine.
Ok, don't tell me to go buy a new one. My machine, as old as it is, it running Linux just fine, thank you. Has been serving me for almost 5 years, and 3 or 3 more years, than I'll consider... hehe.
can it play GTA3 at more than 15 fps?
I'm a minister!
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
Gee, that's one unit upgrade that Blizzard obviously forgot to include in Warcraft III.
A plough here, a grain store there, and voila, +50% to your food output. I'm surprised that nobody's thought of it before...
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
At least it's what I thunk whens I readed they were doing to go with Xenons. Didn't you thunk that to? It's amazed me that we're readed thats tripe.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
Slashdot and professionalim in the same sentence has to be some sort of error.
Professionalism methinks?
Scotty: "I just can't do it captain! I don't have the power!"
:)
"It's not the size of the render farm, it's how you use it."
And of course, let's all imagine a Beowulf cluster of... oh. wait. Right.
(Obligatory. Didn't say it was funny)
imagine a Beowulf cluster of these... oh wait...
Umm, graphic (or video) cards don't actually do any rendering. It's always the cpu. The only thing you need a high-end video card for is (pre)visualization when you are modelling. No sir, it's just that roomful of noble gas doing the work there.
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." - George Orwell, 1984
My head damn near exploded reading that blurb there were so many grammatical errors. Do the Slashdot editors not have a grammar checker they could make use of? I say we start a fundraiser of some sort.
There's always a bottleneck somewhere. It's been the drives, the bus, the expansion slots, the network, the ram...
Our biggest issue right now (in my mind, anyway) is physical media. Sure, ATA 133 is burstable to 133, but who actually thinks they'll get 133 for any length of time. If you Cause Win98 to hang at the End Task screen, the buffer on the drive might fill up and you could get maybe a half-second of 133.
The only way to get great speeds out of media is RAID striping or other such technologies.
Don't know if the cluster they have set up uses much (decentralized) storage, but the network has got to be huge.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I know this is offtopic...but probably close to the heart of many /. readers
why can't I see the value of my Karma any more? The number has been replaced with a descriptive word.
Does your Karma show up as a number still?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Funny how the article mentions they use RenderMan for rendering, yet neglects to mention they use Pixar's "Alfred" software for job distribution/control....
http://www.pixar.com/renderman/artist_tools/too
Fuck you too asshole
I looked on the Foundry website, 'only' 10Gbit.
I hate those exponential powers!
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
imagine a beowoulf cluster of.... oh wait...
Hmm, are these perhaps the new Dell PowerEdge 2650s? We just got one for our lab (dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz, 4GB DDR RAM). Mehopes that they know how loud these machines get, since one of them litterally sounds like a jet engine and is the loudest computer I have ever heard. Just search groups.google.com for "PowerEdge 2650 Loud Fan" to see what I mean.
nak
As I creeped through the electronic void, I began to perceive order out of the chaos. At one level, the network was a swarming mass of frenetic electrons. At another level, it was a carefully ordered expressway of packets zeroing in on their target address. Such perceptions were natural to me...but now, as I traversed through the digital world, I realized that I had a third perception...
I was no longer in formless chasm. I discerned a muddled grey mass slapping back and forth on itself. I heard the lapping noises...this was like the big wet that enveloped me during my time with Cora. I was in a three-dimensional world. Turning my perceptions onto myself, I realized that I was a part of this strange artificial world as well. My new form resembled a human shape, but it was not defined in the way of any particular human. I possessed no hair, features, or even fingernails. I allowed myself scarcely a microsecond to ponder this new form...it mattered not. Forces beyond my control were dragging me to the "center" of the Project Faustus network-the cause of all the activity.
I bobbed along, adhering to the physics of this large amorphous structure, until the muddy grey turned a brilliant azure. The all-encompassing blue ceded to solid green, returning a match in my memory to the park across the street from my ATM enclosure.
As a matter of fact, the pattern of flora and their spatial relationship was identical to the stand of trees in that very park. As I shifted perceptions, I could see the same stand expressed in code, over and over again.
A queasiness washed over me as I walked through this seemingly endless maze. The trees and flowers were not in perfect parity with their real-world counterparts. Colors were too bright, shapes were too flat. The whole atmosphere seemed confined, airless.
Beneath this gaudy veneer, I felt the nexus point of the disruption. The usurper of Project Faustus' massive computing power was close...
As this thought glided past my CONSCIOUSNESS-BUFFER, I saw a break in the infinite stands of trees...the park bench. Two figures on the bench, deep in conversation. And as I drew closer...
First figure...recognition triggered-positive identification. "HOST GEEK" Second figure...recognition triggered...positive identification. No match found.
"Who might you be?" said the mystery figure politely. This man was dressed similarly to my host geek, but extremely well-muscled. His complexion was darker, and he wore a ring of dark hair around his mouth, and another long cluster ran down the back of his neck. A tiny smile played across his lips as he looked me over.
"Weird!" said my host geek. "This guy doesn't really look like anything!"
"He's got the default skin for the system," said the other man. Then he turned to me. "So, you wanna explain yourself?"
"I have come to destroy Project Faustus." I stated.
"Machiney!" exclaimed my host geek, attempting to embrace me (causing an anomolous collision). "This is Guy. He was trapped by Project Faustus too. He used to work for 'em."
"That's right," said Guy, pulling at his chin hair-ring. "I was gonna be killed by the Project for doing some pretty nasty things. Luckily I beamed myself in here. They thought I committed suicide...I haven't been free to move around until that bit of trouble they've been having. Wonder what caused that?" he said with a nervous laugh.
"Yeah-we were both set free from our prisons when that huge ripple started happening, and we met each other here in the middle. Guy here built the whole network, this whole digital world and everything! Isn't that awesome? I've been telling him all about you!" said the host geek.
"Guy! Oh my Gawd! Guy!" another voice parabolized across the airless digital realm. "Ah knew it was yew all along! Yew couldn't be dead!"
"Bubba." Guy replied without emotion.
"It's goin' to hell in a handbasket at the Project!" ejaculated Finn. "Guy-you were right about it! And I knew you were doin' this...I knew you coaunnabin dead!"
"Fuck you Bubba, you turned me in." Guy's eyes turned to slits, and he turned away from the rapidly advancing figure of Dr. Bubba Finn.
"Guy...no!" said Finn, growing increasingly desperate. He ran towards Guy, and attempted to make familiar physical contact. "You don't understand...I love you!"
Tears trickled from Finn's chin as everyone stood silently. I increased the priority of my analysis of Montevideo. The data was beginning to confirm what the electrons deep below had been telling me all along...
Guy noticed it first-as I was delving further into his code, we were being drawn together. My own form began to resemble his own. He violently pulled away from me, gouging a black rift into the sky. Finn and the geek dove behind a tree. "What-what are you doing?" yelled Guy frantically.
"You have taken control of the Project Faustus network." I replied. "You are using the Project's own plan of financial cataclysm and usurpation to force people to enter this digital world. You must be stopped, Guy Montevideo."
I am a sentient ATM.
I live near where Weta is situated, so once I graduate at the end of the year in Software Engineering (Bachelor of Engineering) I'll be trying there!!!
can't you spell 'cool' properly?
and if you like to smoke the linux feces, then why would running XP be 'way cool'?
I've always wanted to use Blender's "Render daemon" button...
Seriously though, does anyone know what kind of modelling and render tools these guys are using ?
'sapientia potestas est'
Rendered at the most powerful site in the Southern Hemisphere ... on Linux!
Everyone is born right-handed; only the greatest overcome it
What a gas!
example.org - powered by Linux!
There's a show on FOX called "American Idol", the long and short of it is that they hope to create a "pop superstar" ala NSync or whatever. The voting for this show is done by the public via telephone. Please call this toll-free number 1 (866) 436-5707 to vote for the most retarded of all the contestants just to undermine the results of this show. Must call within the next 2 hours. Pass it on!
I'm an extremely technical person, but in the world of materials engineering and such. I read /. for computer news and have for 2.5 years now. However, I'm only now starting to do any programming just out of sheer interest. So I don't know squat about this.
Do the render farms work simply as individual nodes rendering individual frames as doled out by some server, or do they work collectively. As in: are they done serially or in parallel? I don't mean this part as a joke, but is the beowulf cluster concept meant to be a single fast computer made of many?
Dumb questions brought on by enough misunderstanding.
to email me: take my
And after all
You're my renderwall....
Thank you Chicago -- Goodnight!
Yah! It was gonna be called Freon!
Strangely, the idea got a very chilly reception, though everyone complained when it eventually got banned.
Get off my launchpad!
a cheap Mac Dual G4 1 Ghz is FASTER.
Its $2799 and comes with a 300 dollar DVD-r burner as part of the price.
It gets over TWICE as many RC5 keys per second than the fastest dual AMD MBs... and per dollar, the XEON is way slower than a Mac at RC5.
Macs have a huge L3 cache and AMDs have no l3 cache so that might be one reason macs are twice as fast, plus a cold page of memory can be simultaneously write and read faster on a mac than a pc typically. That helps for some benchmarks perhaps.
but if you go to TOP500.org they maintain a ranked FRESH list of all the top 500 render/gfop cpu farms.
xeons are rare in the list and Powerpc boards dominate it. check out the list yourself.
Admittedly a better list would be megabyte per gigaflop... a conttest each fall determines that and typically dual Pentium 3 boards with three netwrok cards each win that award.... not this overpriced xeon garbage.
I like xoen for one thing... it has PCI-X now and has for over a year and no AMD has PCI-X shipping yet. Check Pricewatch.com yourself.
PCI-X will ship on macs soon and tahts all I care about.
Somebody has to say it:
Can you imagine a beowulf cluster of these?
Urgo: "I want to live. I want to experience the universe and I want to eat pie!"
Jack: "Who doesn't??"
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.
.
I wouldn't call $4 million NZ (or even US) to be a tremendous amount of capital, for a project like this. If they never use it for another project, they will still have gotten their money out of it. Sure, its a lot of money to me, but I bet they spent more than that on film stock.
But I think the other guy is right and Peter Jackson will make good use of this equipment and these people in the future.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Everytime I read an article like this, it ticks me off.
If they can get this sort of application running on a Linux system, why can't dreamweaver and Adobe port their products to Linux.
Hell and damnation.
I mean it can't be that hard.
I guess the reason is because noone would buy the ports.
Is Linux ultimately only useful to the custom solution and server crowd. Will the professional and consumer desktop ever be tamed?
evanchik.net
They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere'
mm hmm, that would definitely sell all... the.... people who were going to see it anyway (geeks) =)
Obviously they don't know about FreeBSD, else they would dump Linux faster than a hobbit runs from adventure. Perhaps someone should clue them in.
Shouldn't the link be:
220 2.2GHz dual Xeon machines
not
220 2.2GHz dual Xenon machines ?
Not that I'd expect any sort of technical accuracy from this site. It's not like it's the most visited geek site on the 'net or anything...
nuclear presidential echelon assassination encryption virulent strain
Whizzmo
Geek MPAA movies (eg LOTR): good
Linux: good
Using Linux to further the MPAA: good
</karmaburn>
sorry, couldn't resist
Live today. Tomorrow will cost a lot more!
Like most of the post houses they use combinations of software, Maya, Renderman, in house tools, etc.
the hardware cost is usually quite small compared to the cost of the software licenses which get licensed per CPU, that's why you go for 'smaller' numbers of fast CPUs especially when you have enough to get over the minimum number to keep all the artists flowing.
Faster CPUs generally does mean better pictures as you get more goes at it to get it right. There is a degree of artistic control you get from getting feedback...
They also have to work to deadlines and fit in with client demands/expectations.
With this many machine it does pose interesting server requirements... all those images (usually about 12MB each) do have to come and go from somewhwere, oh and you have to be able to find them easily, etc. etc.
...Maybe they can force southern-hemisphere toilets to flush counter-clockwise!!!
-
Granted, they may be using a motherboard with more than 4 DIMM/RIMM slots....
But even still. The prices don't skew THAT much for DDR (though they skew a lot more highly for RDRAM).
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
... the thought of the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere is located in a country whose poeple think a PII(2) machine is soemthing to yell about.
Oh the shame...
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
Slashdot's so funny,
"Down with the MPAA, movie makers are the bad guys" in one article then,
"Go movie makers! Using lots of Linux, yipee"
go here
btw - my FP!
My other sig is a Porsche.
Has it occured to you that the southern hemisphere consists almost entirely of southern africa, south america, australia, indonesia and a couple islands? It's not saying all that much to have the fastest computer, Were probabally talking about a population half that of the USA, and most of it is the "developing world."
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
Massey university just announced that it is going to build a 128 node beowulf cluster (no imagination necessary!). Auckland University have recently got an IBM Regatta class machine.
Just a (quite impressive) stone's throw away from Weta is NIWA's Cray T3E
bash-2.03$ uname -a
sn6908 kupe 2.0.5.51 unicosmk CRAY T3E
I love running that uname :-)
Backups are for wimps. Real men post their data in comments and have slashdot mirror it
Shouldn't we be disappointed that "the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere" is doing nothing more important than entertainment? Surely there is some real problem we could be solving with our collective resources!
Oh well, see you at the theatre on opening night -- I'll be at the 12:05 a.m. show.
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals." --The American President (20.1.2009)
I love seeing these Beowolf clusters.
1 question tho, where the quake? They have to have a massive connection to the internet and they have the most clock cycles.
If they haven't install it yet, I would be more than happy to lend my services.
mmmhhhh xenon
I bet they could find aliens in a day if they ran seti on all of those machines.
a Beowulf cluster of these beowulf clusters...
...and not one of them is a Mac!
But... but... I thought you couldn't be a creative professional without using Steve's greatly insane doorstop!!!
And not before time. Before this purchase all of New Zealand's computing needs were met using a time shared Commodore 64. (I'm a Kiwi, I "can" make jokes like this.)
If anyone from the company is looking on /. trying to get some rid of their old almost-super computers to make way for the new super computers, I can probably manage to take a few off your hands.
:kicks it into an open fire:
Bart: 256? Oh and I'm stuck with this useless 252
Gamestation 252: Don't destroy me! I can still make you happy! To the maaaax!
$8.95/mo web hosting
Good thing I got them on sale!
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
Because if it would/could have been, they would probably have gone for a dual AMD system.
You pay a lot more per XEON CPU, you pay a bit more for RAM (and the bit more adds up pretty quickly with 200 machines with 4GB), you pay a LOT more for the motherboard. I've had do to a renderfarm with budget restrictions, I got twice as much machines for the same price if that intel-based setup (and almost twice as much power).
Stability? not any unusual issues that I wouldn't have got also with Intel-based stuff. I bought TYAN TIGER MPs, with dual athlon XP, and the hardware is top notch. The only issue I could see is if everything is heavily optimized for SSE2 and money isn't a problem, then it would make sense to grab P4 XEONs, but that's the only case I'd see (aside from marketting or direct rebates from intel for free exposure, etc etc) that could make someone take such a decision.
My 0.02 cents.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Dual Xeon's, handles at least 4 GB RAM, and either on-board or PCI Gbit ethernet (or is it just 100Mbit as someone pointed out?). AND it's in a 1U case? I didn't know Xeon's (even the new, non-Slot 2 ones) fit in a 1U case.
The Dell 2650 is 2U.
I wonder why they didn't go with Blades? 476 servers equates to 1 1/2 racks full of blade servers. Not something that comes across as the most powerful render farm in the southern hemisphere.
WRONG! Many standard Apple Powerpcs in Top500.org!
...
:
You never heard of "ASCI Blue"?
It uses PowerPC 604e... the same chip my PowerMac 8500 uses.
There are many Power3 top500 clusters, such as position #2, but there are also many PowerPC604e spots
check the list yourself and quit lying by saying that there are not mac-style cpus : here are some (7) I saw in current ranked list
ASCI Blue-Pacific SST, IBM SP 604e
Bank Administration Institute (BAI) SP PC604e 332 MHz
BCDI - SP PC604e 332 MHz
Metallurgical Industry Co. - SP PC604e 332 MHz
BASF SP PC604e 332 MHz
DeTeCSM
DeTeCSM
And NONE of the top500.org uses linux OS... none as far as I know. That was true a year ago and is still true.
Macs are indeed 1 Ghz , by the way. Thats why the XServe is over twice as fast as the fastest amd dual mp at rc5... macs arent only 500Mhz, they are 1Ghz in recent months, standard and cheap.
If you are lamenting poor literacy on Slashdot then perhaps you should have known "become" would be a better choice of word rather than "gotten".