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)
Dual Xeon ?
$45 per U Colocation Special
Give the the warm orange glow of dual neon machines any day.
"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
No, I haven't read the article. Is that necessary?
And yet they still can't make Frodo look like a guy.
...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
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
How about XPs modded into MPs?
All from Gamepc but here they are
Pentium 4 Xeon Multi-Processor Under Linux
Prestonia Xeon 2.0 GHz vs. Athlon MP 1900+
kawai
>> 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_.
"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.
but i figured out.. Fellowship of the Ring
And Noah said, "God...what's a qubit?"
CAUTION: Product may be hot after heating
According to those idiots at the USGS, "The northern hemisphere has positive latitudes. The southern hemisphere has negative latitudes. Longitudes are perpendicular to the Equator are range from -180 degrees (International Date Line) to +179.99999... degrees (just west of the International Date Line). Under this convention -- the western hemisphere has negative longitudes and the eastern hemisphere has positive longitudes."
Yeah. All Americans are dumb. Good call.
Education is the silver bullet.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but bus speeds have increased since you bought that Pentium 75 system. Though not as much as cpu speed, because that's historically been the focus of the, uh, personal computer. Who cares about optimizing network transactions on a PC? They were built to get away from mainframes, remember? Well, that was true 20 years ago and the paradigm has stuck for longer than it should have.
Even so, Consumer hard drives can now claim ATA-133 speeds, that's probably an order of magnitude faster than the 1.2 GB drives from five years ago. And SerialATA is coming. On the server side, I think U320 SCSI is out now. SCSI started at 5, now it's at 320. THat's like 64 times faster.
RAM has kept up, too. The first DIMMS were 66MHz, now you can get effectively 400MHZ DDR, or faster than that if you want soon-to-be-out-of-business RAMBUS.
Heck they invented the AGP port so we could play games, and that's at 4X now, with 8X on the horizon and some really bigtime advances in GPU power in just the past two years.
None of these have seen the speed increases of the CPU, but they are moving along at a nice clip. The PCI bus is maybe the weakest link here, but it's gotten better.
I think there's a lot of room for growth left in the current physical materials. I keep hearing 15 years until we hit the quantum barrier in CPUs, if we keep up with Moore's Law. There was a great article not so long ago about hard drives, and how they are basically doubling in areal storage density every year. 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?
Kinda like the predicament they find with broadband. There's nothing else to do with all that bandwidth than download mp3s and pr0n and warez. Oops.
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. You may be right but those benchmarks don't support your case much because they don't include any P4 Xeons.
I don't think so. Isn't that big new weather-prediction site in Japan? I would imagine that's bigger, though I haven't checked the numbers.
My deviantArt site
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.
Best Slashdot comment ever
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
Maybe they use channel bonding? ;)
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
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.
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
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)
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
There isn't...
b ooksea rch/isbnInquiry.asp?userid=66NT518KIO&isbn=0521635 039
Just think of it in terms of hilbert spaces (or just plain vector spaces). A qubit spans a 2 dimentional hilbert space. A (normalized) state on that space could be written
|S>=a1|0>+a2|1>
just think of |> as a vector, where a1 and a2 are ANY complex numbers such that |a1|^2+|a2|^2=1
for two qubits then you just have a 4 state space
|S>=a1|00>+a2|01>+...
for more info check out:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/textbooks/
With the raw graphics processing power of the PlayStation 2 and the availability of PS2/Linux, I wonder if they have any plan to add 'em in...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I looked on the Foundry website, 'only' 10Gbit.
I hate those exponential powers!
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
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
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'
"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!
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!
Damn it! I swear I copy and pasted that bit for that very reason. Must have X's/Slashcode/cosmic rays fault. :)
Nerd: Derogatory term typically directed at anybody with a lower Slashdot ID than you.
I agree with you, but to play Devil's Advocate, there are sometimes reasons you want a fast CPU, not just a fast cluster. Our SGI sales guy often tries to make this point, for the obvious reasons, but it's true.
If you are rendering out a large number of frames, you want the most possible aggregate CPU power, because rendering is extremely parallelisable (each frame stands alone). So 50 Athlons is better than 40 Xeons. But if you are just rendering out a 5- or 10-frame test sequence, and the wall is not already overloaded - then you want the 40 Xeons instead, since each one can take a frame and you'll get your result back faster.
There is also the issue of network bandwidth. In some cases you can benefit quite a bit by having fast boxes with as many CPUs per box as possible. This is because there is a non-trivial network burden in sending out the job to be rendered, along with all its textures, images, etc. This can be mitigated by multicasting and caching - but I don't know to what extent Renderman does this - but I know if you don't design it right, it can really slow down your jobs. (We evaluated one render distribution system that relied on Windows SMB file sharing for its I/O. Sending a 200-MB job to each of 10 render crunchers pretty much killed it.)
"How can you claim that you are anti-crack, while still writing a window manager?" — Metacity README
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 $4 million NZ (or even US) to be a tremendous amount of capital, for a project like this. If they never use it for another project, they will still have gotten their money out of it. Sure, its a lot of money to me, but I bet they spent more than that on film stock.
But I think the other guy is right and Peter Jackson will make good use of this equipment and these people in the future.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Everytime I read an article like this, it ticks me off.
If they can get this sort of application running on a Linux system, why can't dreamweaver and Adobe port their products to Linux.
Hell and damnation.
I mean it can't be that hard.
I guess the reason is because noone would buy the ports.
Is Linux ultimately only useful to the custom solution and server crowd. Will the professional and consumer desktop ever be tamed?
evanchik.net
They don't ALL work on the same frame at once. But it can be set up so that more than one machine works on the same frame: each renders a part of the same frame, then they are automatically pieced together by Alfred (the distributed rendering software that comes with Photorealistic RenderMan).
Massey university just announced that it is going to build a 128 node beowulf cluster (no imagination necessary!). Auckland University have recently got an IBM Regatta class machine.
Just a (quite impressive) stone's throw away from Weta is NIWA's Cray T3E
bash-2.03$ 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
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.
You couldn't be more wrong if you tried. You could try, but you'd fail.
My, aren't we hostile!
Yes, the Prime Meridian (0 0' 0") ...
What, one zero wasn't enough for you?
Sorry, your magical Google powers failed you this time. The Prime Meridian runs right through the Old Royal Naval Observatory. The buildings have been inactive since 1998 and under the control of the National Maritime Museum.
It had everything to do with Harrison's naval chronometer. King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory in 1675 to solve the problem of finding longitude at sea. [cite] Harrison's chronometer was the first instrument which managed this, and for quite a while, the British had exclusive use of it. This allowed them to produce vastly more accurate nautical charts than everyone else. Since they were British charts, they used the British Prime Meridian. Since they were vastly more accurate than all other charts at the time, any sea navigator who could get his hands on them would have used them instead of their domestic naval charts, and very quickly nearly all naval charts in use put the prime meridian through the British Royal Naval Observatory.
I'll let the Observatory's own pages tell the story: ... [large block quote] ...
By the time of the conference, the British Prime Meridian already was The Prime Meridian in all but name, and had been for over a century.
So, it was an internationally agreed meridian, not an imperically imposed one.
Incorrect, it was an empirically determined meridian that eventually the rest of the political world accepted.
Impossible. Construction of the Eiffel Tower did not even start until 1887, so how could it be used as a landmark for a prime meridian in 1884?
Perhaps, next time, you'll check the historical facts before you start giving history lessons.
Perhaps next time, you will realize the ability to type in Prime Meridian into a search engine does not make up for a complete and total lack of understanding about the subject.
Best Slashdot comment ever