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!!
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!!!!
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
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.
.