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