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Pixar Eclipses Sun with Linux/Intel
lieutenant writes "Pixar Animation Studios is replacing servers from Sun in its render farm with eight new blade servers from Rackspace. In all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and it runs the open-source Linux operating system. Pixar has ported its Renderman software to run on Linux." I'd love to see their electric bill ;)
How fast they can now render over the old Sun servers?
(imaging a Beowulf cluster of THESE!)
1024 xeon's? jeeze, my electric is $120/mo with one amd and one intel running half the time.
For around $25,000 you too can make Pixar quality movies (+ the cost of those servers). https://renderman.pixar.com/
I am actually scared, to imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
What signature defines me as a person?
My god, I thought they had trouble scaling Linux that far. Seriously. How the hell do you do that when "stock" linux doesnt like 8 CPUs?
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
With that type of processing power, they should be able to calculate to infinity...and beyond.
1024 is even for the rest of us.
Didn't I follow the same link from the earlier Rendezvous with Rama story?
"E pur si muove!" - attributed to Galileo Galilei, 1564-1642
Perhaps if Sun spent more time getting their processors faster at good cost they wouldn't be losing this kind of ground. Sun took way too long to come out with their UltraSparc III processor and now clustering technology is at the point where it's much cheaper to string together a bunch of commodity PCs than purchase a high end Sun box.
Wonder why Pixar didn't choose Apple's XServe - I've sure Steve would have given them a small discount! ;-)
Although I guess the XServe is more of a file/print/DB server than a number cruncher given the G4's that sit inside the box are easily out-performed by Intel/AMD these days.
Not 1024 CPUs in one box. Each CPU sits on a "blade" card and acts like a seperate system. It's a bug cluster.
1024 is 2^10. Computers operate in binary, and 1024 is an "even" number when you consider binary.
I assumed that Apple created their Xserve rack-mounted servers for exactly this purpose: not just for animation studios, but for Pixar in particular (since Steve Jobs runs both companies and does things like selling Pixar DVDs to Apple to give away in promotions, thereby increasing the number of DVDs sold at launch, getting his movies in front of more people, and of course providing more incentive to buy whatever it is he's bundling the DVDs with).
I guess the density of the blade servers is higher than the Mac servers, but it would have been a big boost to the Xserve's credibility if Pixar had chosen to use a ton of them. Perhaps Apple will make a new server (Xblade?) that's more suited to this use. It wouldn't surprise me...
"I'd love to see their electric bill "
Dude, they render stuff... would you not prefer to see that...
I'm curious to how many BTUs that thing is rated for..
Bel, the mostly sane.. "Of course I can't see anything! I'm standing on the shoulders of idiots." -- Me
One of the advantages of *nix is that if you code is well written then you can write once and compile anywhere (except possibly windows), so it's nice to see a company showing that this is possible. It's a shame they chose Xeon's though. The Xeon is the latest in a long line of chips which evolved from the 8086, a fairly nondescript 16-bit chip. It still caries a lot of legacy bagage around with it and so has to run several times faster (and drink several times as much power generating several times as much heat) as a well designed chip in order to go as fast. Intel and AMD are able to sell chips which compete with RISC chips only because they sell enough that they can seriously outspend everyone else on R&D making a dead architecture last just a little longer. It would have been nice if the Alpha had been able to compete with x86 on price when NT4 was released, maybe then we'd have left the x86 ship for good. Whenever I here someone suggest OS X or Solaris on x86 I always wonder what they have against the OS that they want to cripple it by putting it on such an evil architecture.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Because it's 2^10? Because things in the computer world tend to happen in powers of two or multiples of other things? 1600x1200 = 800x600x(2x2). Because it makes more sense than arbitrarily rounding things?
I could have sworn that the software couldn't run at all in 64 bit. I'm just wondering if they didn't take a step down when they converted 64-bit optimized code to run on regular high cache 32-bit pentiums.
Great for linux and anyone who has half a brain knows that you can make a very nice system from the Intel Xeon chips and Linux. But Sparcs aren't x86's and they certainly don't run the same. I've been running a server off of a pII 400 mhz Xeon with 2 megs cache on it for nearly 4 years now. It's never failed me yet and I have no intentions of upgrading anytime soon, but then again I'm not rendering anything in 3 deminsions either.
Doesn't dreamworks use this type of technology already?
Damned MPAA members ... we hate you because of your strives for world domination, but then you go and support linux ... bastards we just love to hate you.
Lastly I'm really surprised that Pixar didn't go for a server farm of OS X boxen, just goes to show ya, right tool for the job. Maybe they'll throw darwin on their at least.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Hey, I liked Monsters, Inc.
No, I'm not female. Easy killer.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
why didn't Pixar go with macs .. i keep hearing from mac fanatics how much better they are .. and how powerful they are .. if thats true .. why didn't pixar buy the xserve for the render farm? ... if its not good for the goose .. how can it be good for the gander
As far as I know Rackspace is a managed hosting company. Rackable Systems makes servers - Yahoo and Google both use them. Anyone know if the article has it wrong, and Pixar is actually using Rackable machines?
They might not have chosen XServes, but I'm wondering what flavor of open-source OS they are running? It's Linux-based, but there didn't seem to be much said beyond that.
The article also insinuates again that a possible Intel/Apple connection may happen in the near future. Perhaps the servers are going to be running a customized OS, maybe even the mythical Marklar (the Intel-compatible version of OS X that has been rumored for some time).
But still, it would have been nice to see the XServe's get a little more press.
Dr. Wu
1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors... I'd love to see their electric bill
Well, ignoring the power requirements of RAM, bus controllers, network adapters, hard disks which are probably used for boot only...
Intel rates these things for 74.0W thermal dissipation, which is a pretty good measure of the electrical power consumed... since, unless something is badly wrong, your Xeon chip will not dissipate energy as light or sound.
74W x 1,024 = 75,776W continuous.
Assume they're on 24/7. Assume a cost of $0.06 per kWh, including distribution, debt retirement, Ontario's capped electric rates, etc.
There are 30 days in the average month. There are 24 hours in the average day [grin]. Therefore, there are 720 hours per month.
720 hours @ 75,776W = 54,558,720kWh.
Just a little over $3.2 million per month.
I'd imagine it's less than that; their electric rate is probably somewhat less based on their consumption. But consider that the depreciation on that hardware is probably a greater monthly expense than the electricity to power it...
I'm glad Linux is ready for Pixar, because Linux sure ain't ready for the desktop.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Is renderman open source yet?
Linux is one step, making sure they have a completely open system is another
1024 is an "even" number when you consider binary.
Today I managed to learn new mathematics....that the even-ness of a number depends on the base it is expressed in. Hmmmm....perhaps the laws of mathematics change regularly, after all!!
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
I must be lost here, but most of these renderfarms I've seen that use Sun products is for network storage solutions, though they're even losing the marketshare these days. I think what people are starting to realize is that just because you paid a whole lot for it, doesn't mean you got "The Best".
Supercomputers of 5 years ago can be built today with computers being thrown away and setup into a computing cluster. Obviously the good old days of 40 trillion dollar super computers paid for by the goernment aren't the super computers of today.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
... would be Tux featuring as an incidental character in Toy Story 3 :)
I teach MCSE courses down in Chatsworth, recently we got a lot of Engineers from boeing coming over for Windows XP classes. Why? They're dumping all their Sparc Stations and moving to XP on cheap Intel hardware. Its faster, and 2/3s of the applications they need run it already. The last third they were working on.
The IT people I talked to were surprisingly happy with XP so far. These were all Unix only kind of people actually.
The other thing they were doing were looking into dumping their Crays in favor of LINUX clusters. The comments were along the lines of how much faster and cheaper it was to put together a cluster of a 100 cheap Intel boxes than getting a new Cray. That, and they were all already familiar with the unix style interface. On top of it all, the GUI interface (I think they were running Gnome) was so much nicer than CDE on Solaris.
So Sun it getting it from both sides- Cheap Wintel boxes and Cheap Linux boxes. No wonder they finally relented and released Solaris 9 on Intel.
They have half-depth 1U boxes. That's right, two servers in 1U, back to back.
Includes space between the two for cabling and cooling.
They specialize in delivering easy to manage (physically) racks of highly commoditized systems.
(I work with them in a reseller relationship)
Imagine a 71U rack(minus 1U for a switch), with 142 boxes, all dual proc. 248 procs in a rack!
Man, I wish they'd put the right link in there.
Striving to achieve a lower state of conciousness
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
I swear, I'm going to be very sad if some day high end servers, etc are all running x86 boxes running Linux. I huge Sun Enterprise server is so much cooler than a bunch of cheap-ass boxes running Linux.
A lot of people are going to be saying "just one example of how Sun is dying", but coming from a place that runs several hundred Sun machines (and being a Sun fanboy), I can understand why they made this switch. For shere processing power on-the-cheap, the x86 world has had a lead on Sun and other big UNIX vendors for a few years. Having a decent OS (linux) to run on those machines, makes it even easier to switch.
It's about using the right tool for the job, and now that x86/linux/bsd has matured to a point where it can be used for some professional applications, it only makes sense to see things like this happen.
Sun is going to be around for a long time. As many other people have pointed out, they're just retreating somewhat to more a of niche market, where they are the right tool for the job.
The executives at my company are very interested in linux, because of the outrageous leap in processing power per dollar, and the reductions in CPU-based licensing costs for software like Oracle is staggering. The concern, though, is stability.
Sun Fire and Enterprise servers are really expensive, but they stay up all the time. Swapping a failed processor or NIC or memory stick without halting the box is really important on a mission-critical server. Likewise, a well built Sun box never panics, and if it ever does, Sun will insist that their engineers look at the crash dump to figure out what went wrong.
I think Linux has won the performance battle, but what about the stability battle? You need to win both to win the war.
I recently attended a talk by Google's chief engineer. They have approximately 15,000 x86 machines running Linux at seven data centers in the United States.
Weird failures occur so often, such as disks returning garbage without the controller informing the OS, that Google does a checksum on _every_ data structure in their user-level software. He also talked about how Linux is good enough for them, but it doesn't perform well with respects to I/O under heavy load. He says they like Linux because they have the source-code and that they minimize excessive I/O loads on their machines. Nobody asked why they don't use FreeBSD but I suspect its because Linux has better hardware support and Google builds their own machines with numerous different components based on the latest technology.
You've heard of this phenomenon, yes? Assigning many machines to a task? That's how rendering is done. Machine 1 handles scene 1 or frame 1, machine 2 handles frame 36, blah, blah, blah...
It's not a 1024-CPU box... it's several hundred boxes with one or more CPU's. Hence the term 'render farm', along the lines of 'server farm'...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
How do you remember to breathe?
How about the marvellous "Solaris scales better than linux in 64 boxens", troll now?
Sun uniprocessor performance has been very uncompetitive for quite some time now. I bet they would have switched a long time ago if it was not for the difficulty of porting software from Solaris to Linux. Plus human inertia ...
The worst problem for Sun is once they loose customers to Linux, there is no turning back.
They still hold well in 64-bit area, however, once commodity hardware such as x86-64 gets there, this battle will also be over.
This is the main reason why the company is likely to go down the drain.
The only natural base is e. Man arbitrarily likes whole numbers, nature like real numbers, and e is everywhere.
Therefore, ln (1024) = 6.931471806... which is not an even number.
I suggest therefore that an even number of processors for the render farm is either
e^6 = 403.4287935 or
e^7 = 1,096.633158.
Of course, Intel is wedded to the whole numbers of processors thing, which utterly thwarts mathematical logic and correctness. Their site also runs on IIS, so what other foolishness can you expect? Heathens.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Well done. You have the skills of a master troll.
If anyone else is looking for a funny/informative/insightful article that outlines tested techniques for slashdot trolling I recommned this article
... I guess we know which one you are.
Therefore, ln (1024) = 6.931471806... which is not an even number.
I must really be on a roll today.....
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
This cluster is so powerful, when they try to render anything with it, all they get is "42" on the console.
The gui is the last thing on the list when buying a compute cluster! And besides, Gnome (and KDE and others) work fine on Solaris.
that if you want to get serious work done, you must use x86 systems and Linux and not a Mac w/ OSX. :-P
SIGFAULT
Just when good ole' Sun was showing a sparc of life again, here comes naughty dirty Lintel and pulls the rug from underneath them...
Pixar is on the right track. I do ASIC verification, mainly on Sun boxes (fastest USparc IIIs, multi-proccessor, 14GBs memory, etc). Lately, I have been running the exact same jobs on an LSF enabled Linux farm of Intel boxes.
The improvement is 3-4 times speedup ie 8 hour Sun jobs take 2 hours on Intels.
For the price of one dual proccesor Sun workstation, you can get ten Intel boxes running linux.
Not only is the speedup great, I need less licences to run the CAD software (doing multiple regression jobs). Since a license seat per CAD tool can run from 30K to 200K each plus 10% a year maintence fee, the savings are huge.
Changing over to linux was trivial. I like and have used Suns for years and Suns were a major player in this industry. But I firmly believe that this paradigm is going to be a SUN KILLER!
...that anyone who is looking to achieve price/performance in horizontal scaling should stay clear of RISC, especially Sun.
Cruise over to spec.org and have a look at the numbers, Intel and AMD easily mop up the competition when you start investigating cost associated with specINT and specFP numbers.
Anyone get the feeling that Sun's "brightest hours" are behind them? As others have mentioned, they're getting hit from the Windows XP side, as well as Linux. If Solaris dwindles as a result of this, and becomes a niche/high-end item, what does this say for HP, SGI, and the rest of Unixen?
I've been thinking in terms what are/will be the Big Three:
Linux, Mac OS X, and that other thing.. uh, Windows XP. I wouldn't bet on traditional Unixen as a growth area, by any means. Won't be long for some companies to become "Unix-free and Windows-free" zones...
'nuff said.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
People are talking of stability superiority of Solaris over Linux on this matter, when they don't take into account these two simple facts:
a) This is supposed to render stuff, not to be a 24/7 system. I suppose it's booted today, used for a week or 4 days and then shut down again, until they have stuff to render.
b) People forget that Solaris runs on Sun hardware, not Linux hardware. Don't blame Linux for IBM and Intel's faults _please_.
You know, I really don't know what the logic is of arguing that. The people who are using Linux on their desktops now know Linux well enough to completely disregard that. I suppose you will scare newbies away until someone gives them a knoppix CD to play with, but MS spends BILLIONS already for that your little rant is insignificant in comparison.
Maybe Linux is more than ready for the desktop, it just isn't ready for your narrow view of what a desktop should be. And it is not that I really care that you are not satsified, but bitching to a bunch of volunteers seems a bit insane, because I don't think they really care that your are not satisfied, either.
Regardless, Linux isn't going away anytime soon (at least not in my lifetime), so why don't you create a project devoted to "making it ready for the desktop according to my definitions" instead of wasting your life away making complaints about the fruits of a VOLUNTEER EFFORT.
Do you complain about the Salvation Army or Goodwill Industries, as well?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
1982 - born in Nebula - incorporated with 4 employees
1984 - protostar - NFS is introduced
1995 - main sequence begins - Java Released
1996 - red giant - Using Java technology, NASA engineers develop an interactive application allowing anyone on the Internet to be a "virtual participant" in the space administration's groundbreaking mission to Mars.
SUPERNOVA - Sun battles MS over Java and Windows
Blackhole - TODAY!
References:
http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/coinfo/history.html
For some reason, I just can't seem to resist nit picking here. BSD has been mature enough for professional use for quite a long time now.
In fact, I seem to remember a time (pre-Solaris) when Sun systems ran a form of BSD.Get a book on binary.. then you will understand why its 1024 and NOT 1000...
Kids these days.. just dont understand the fundamentals.. and this is a good example of this.
Throw a Z80 at one of these new 'graduates' and tell them to build a comptuer.. they would freak.. 'what, no AGP port?'... ' whats a register'...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Agreed. Nor are traditional business apps. Most traditional business apps (Sun's bread and butter market) require a higher bandwidth to compute ratio than can be accomplished by regular intel gear.
In these cases, just throwing a higher clock speed at the CPU does not really do a whole lot. The backplane, layers of cache and interconnects need to be faster.
Sun knows this, as do the people that buy higher end servers.
Movie rendering is different, and therefore a Linux cluster may do just fine.
I would think that they would need more ram per node than blade servers would allow. I mean my friends a graphic arts student and even his modeling jobs frequently bump against 4gig limits. I would have thought two or four way Opterons with gobs of ram would be more up their ally.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I'm just wondering which distro they are running... Would it be big playa Red Hat or did they choose the less support-backed versions like Debian?
I couldn't find anything on their site mentioning this either.
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
Migrating from Microsoft to Linux is one thing. But from Sun, AIX, HPUX,...,...,..,BSD to Linux can be a dangerious activity. The strangth of the Traditional *nixs is the fact that their code has been matured and well tested (Speaking in relitive term there are exceptoions that I am sure almost everyone can point out). These systems have been well design to work very dependability and well integrated to work with its hardware. Speed and Price is not always the only features you need to buy hardware. There is hardware realiably, scalibility, power usage, software availability, support, and other factors as well. most Linux distributions) and Windows has a tendency to change a lot and forces people to relarn the product every new version so every couple of years emploies get a new learning curve to over come, While Traditional *nixs tend to be simular from the previous version so they can can upgraded without give the people a new learning curve. Of course that gets rid of some gee-wiz and would you look at that factor but it does save money in the long run.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
71U are you serious?
Since 42U racks are almost 7 feet tall, a 71U rack would be over 10 feet tall. you couldn't reach the top nodes easily, and they wouldn't fit in most server rooms (which already have raised floors for cabling). Better to use 42 and spread out a little. Plus getting enough power lines into a 42U rack is already a challange.
Another thought is 36U racks because they can be wheeled through standard doors. 42U's require an extra 2-3 inches.
84 dual processor systems in one rack is still impressive.
Salvation Army sure ain't ready for the battlefield.
Sun is going to be around for a long time. As many other people have pointed out, they're just retreating somewhat to more a of niche market, where they are the right tool for the job.
:-().
The major issue with that stategy is that their niche is highly profitable and subject to fierce competition from HP and IBM. Both of those companies know how to build scalable machines just as well as Sun does, they have fast processors and they aren't afraid to sell Linux on their servers.
HP is even better positionned as they can sell HP-UX, Linux or Windows, depending on what the customer needs or wants (which is often different
if each of these was running and unpatched version of SQL server :)
uh...
no.
Someone you trust is one of us.
then why is no one using it?
Its all about the distinction between shared and distributed memory architectures. Different applications benefit from different types of parralelism which the above architectures provide. If to solve the problem independent chunks of code can be run that require no communication at run time then clearly a blade type solution (distrbiuted memory) is viable, but if the calculations are co dependent on each other and require communication of interrim results then the overhead of communication can quickly become the critical path and shared memory parallelism becomes a better solution. It also depends on the level of parralelilsm built into the implementation of the algorithms inside pixars redering program itself.
Its one damn thing before another. (Dick Bird 1999)
1024 is 2^10. Computers operate in binary, and 1024 is an "even" number when you consider binary.
Dude, 1024 is an "even" number when you consider that it's not odd.
"Scientists predict that one day the Sun will fail."
Why bother.
Why the hell 1024 procesors?? Why not 1000??
1024 nodes makes a perfect 10 dimension hypercube. Hypercubes can have major advantages for speeding communications within sub-cubes, which can speed certain types of parallelized applications. Also with this architecture you can avoid a central switch system.
However, you would have to buy 10 ethernet cards per machine, which would be hard to pull off with blades, and I can't think of a way off the top of my head why a hypercube would help with frame rendering, It might be a data server locality thing... but either way, they have their reasons.
Is anyone else reminded of this?
Why go from being tied from one vendor to another? Buying an Xserve kills all the advantages of using commodity hardware. Not to mention on a price/performance ratio x86 blows xserve out of the water. Xserves are great for shops were you don't have a skilled administration staff, but obviously this is not the case with Pixar.
ooops! Here you go: http://tipatat.com/artworks/eclipse.jpg
TuxStory!
How many slashes would a slashdot dot, if a slashdot could dot slashes?
Ignore my comment about 10 ethernet cards per machine... you could avoid that and still build a hypercube.
agreed. everyone says apple is going to die all the time. I think apple has officially been declared dead 27 times in the last 5 years. people even declare linux dead. Microsoft has even been declared dead. I'm going to start a new trend. I'm going to declare Sun alive.
-
I have heard from several places that Intel's PR flacks have been flogging this story mercilessly, so it's not too surprising to see it show up in Slashdot. Twice.
:)
To get the inaccuracy out of the way -- RenderMan has been running on Linux for several years now, and I would be surprised if Linux wasn't the dominant platform for RenderMan for quite some time, outside of Pixar of course.
I am really surprised, though, that at this point in time they'd go from 64-bit to 32-bit machines, especially as 64-bit PC-like machines are just becoming available. Why not go with Itanium or the new Hammer? Each of Pixar's movies to date have been gloriously more complex and hard-to-render than the last one -- and while I know that they go to fairly extreme lengths to keep the memory footprint down I would think that they'd be bumping up against the 4GB limit already. If not now, then quite soon.
Perhaps this is just a stopgap to get Nemo finished, even 1024 servers is a fairly small cost. Certainly it would be compared to the RenderMan licenses
Every RenderMan user except for Pixar has to look to get the maximum rendering power per CPU, as the licenses are $5,000 and up, while the CPUs are far far cheaper than that. I suppose Pixar's figure of merit is rendering power per dollar or rendering power per BTU (for cooling limited situations), or even render power per ft^2. Still, the 32-bit machines are a baffling choice to me.
thad
ps. My company has a render garden (too small to be a render farm) of a dozen or so Athlons.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
I understand how you feel. Everyone has something they want to be a "purist" about. But at some point you have to address the reality of the situation and just capitulate to way the world is.
x86 won.
Its not about the most technically elegant or efficient designs. Its about the last man standing after everyone's been thrown out of the ring.
x86 has defeated PPC, Sparc, Alpha, MIPS, PA-RISC, and it will soon defeat Itanium in the form of x86-64. No one is left to fight the good fight. They all went softly into that good night.
Conform. Comply. Collaborate. Resistance is futile. You will be recompiled.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Oh, I stole the subj. line from someone else.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Surf's up, DUDE.
STFUAH.
Today I managed to learn new mathematics....that the even-ness of a number depends on the base it is expressed in. Hmmmm....perhaps the laws of mathematics change regularly, after all!!
Minor point of terminology. Grandparent was mistaken and used the term "even" to refer to "nice round". The number 1,024 is a nice round number in base 2 (1,024 == 2^10), just as 1,000 is a nice round number to a base-10 computer (1,000 = 10^3). Whether a number is even or not depends only on whether or not 2 is present in its prime factorization, but nice roundness of a natural number does depend on the base.
My definition of "nice roundness": A "nice round number" in base b is any natural number n = a * b^p with 1. small a and 2. b not a factor of a.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Incorrect. FreeBSD, the most advanced BSD has had piss poor SMP support until the release of 5.0.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
It kills their electric bill. (I was an auditor at the phone company).
At the same time, I cannot begrudge them this usage as the principles of the GPL are far more important to me than playing DVDs. Hopefully this a small step in the movie industry embracing the ideals of sharing and cooperation in their entirety
But you are definitely right about a lot of things. I am by no means telling the developers to stop (not that it would matter if I did, cause they wouldn't;).
I believe you are referring to a group of users more savvy about computers. I am referring to the types that have trouble installing software because they download a file and don't know where to look for it to install it. I am afraid such users make up the majority of desktop users I know. And the only way I have ever been able to get them to install anything is by getting them to use Lindows click'n run. Such users do not function well with Windows because they don't know how to defrag, or to delete temp files every once and a while. So they get to a point where they don't use computers much at all, because their windows box has degraded too badly. In such cases, I see Linux being much more self-sustaining.
Anyway, I don't see any reason for us to argue over "what kind of user makes up the majority of users." We both agree that Linux needs to be better, and that is enough to base a community on.
I don't preach to other users to install Linux on their desktops, but I do constantly hand out knoppix cds.
Regardless of where it is today, I think we all have an idea of where it is going;)
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Money. Huge discounts that established vendors don't feel a need to match. It's that simple.
When a smaller or newer or less famous vendor wants to gather some instant PR, they will often give astonishing discounts to capture high-profile customers. The customer gets a bunch of stuff for cheap and the new vendor sends out a ton of press releases about how they were "selected" over brand X. Do you think for a moment that Sun couldn't have met/beat the lowball number if they felt like doing it?
Note that the press release never gives specific prices that were paid by the high-profile customer. Note, in fact, that the high-profile customer is almost always prohibited from talking actual dollars.
Why? Because the new vendor absolutely, positively won't give those prices to other customers and really doesn't want those other customers to know that they're being badly screwed when compared to the high-profile customer.
When the Rackspace issues a press release saying that Pixar paid $X per server and that they'll give that same price to anybody, then I'll believe that the selection was based on anything substantial.
I just eclipsed Windows with Linux on my home system.
I just eclipsed my old toothbrush with a new one.
I just eclipsed the shit in my ass-crack with toilet paper.
Now, don't I sound FUCKING STUPID? Yes, I do.
This sig is part of your complete breakfast.
As clerification to anyone who is confused by my use of the word even, I used it in context of the original post, which you may or may not have read (it's been modded down, so you might not have seen it.) I use it in the context of even number being a number that is nicely rounded, as the original poster refered to 1000 as a nicely rounded, even, number. I also would like to point out that I put in quotes, to suggest that although it isn't the correct definintion of even, it is the definition used in context of the original post. OK? Now get off my back, I know the difference between even and odd numbers.
Well if you don't need a journalling file system, real SMP support nor decent threading for something to be "professional", then I guess *BSD might be "professional", indeed.
Why do former Unix geeks trade in their work computer and get an XP machine? Why, to play games at work, of course!
wtf. these are *SUNS* blade servers. Sun supplies them with intel processors and linux. I don't understand why everyone makes a big deal out of this. Its posted on every news site and it means absolutely nothing. heh you're all macrumors.com now gg
I'm sure it won't be long before this will be construed as proof that Linux is displacing Windows rather than Unix.
Oh, well...
but when are they going to spend some money and teach their animators how to model a human that doesn't look like a puppet?
Airbus for me!!! I'd like to stay in the air, thank you.
They should have picked FreeBSD to give them better robustness and performance.
One Word. MS-office. Enough said.
..and no I am sure its the MCSE IT directors making the decsion and not the actual Unix users. This is how ms gains marketshare. They target our bosses with an integrated TCO solution.....then the cost saved is spent on BSA auditing at their own expense.
http://saveie6.com/
I like this quote from a Maccentral article: ...Jobs delivered the morning keynote to Intel's annual sales conference in Las Vegas.
Maybe there's hope for OS X on Intel after all. Goodbye Classic, Goodbye Altivec, Hello to some driver rewrites, but what a great leap in price/performance!
I can't think of a better model to begin this transition with than the XServe.
The driving factor was the APPLICATIONS. They ran way faster on Wintel than Sparc, and they were available. The MS IT team was somewhat unprepared and stingy with giving out information on how to integrate the new WinXP machines into the existing Windows Server infrastructure. The (former) Unix Engineers wanted to do RIS and the like. But they were having to put in their own seperate Win2k Servers and figure out how to do the Domain structure for AD.
So it seemed that the MS-IT team didn't push the Unix people to do Windows. In fact, whenever I go to MS-sponsered seminars there is usually one speaker who blasts the way Boeing does their IT work (they write their own management scripts and treat it like Unix instead of Windows or some such MS-sponsered FUD)
Itanium and Hammer aren't yet suitable for an investment as large as Pixar has just made. The chips and motherboards aren't cost-effective compared to 32-bit, and there's not enough experience with that hardware yet to point out all of the gotchas. Next time. They'll probably do another render farm in a year. They want to get 3 or 4 times their present size - at least in square feet of office space. Crazy as that sounds, if you've seen the present huge campus.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
That's kind of funny. My post went from 5 insightful to redundant, and now I can't see how many mods it got . . . makes me wonder about the credibility of slashdot moderation.
Or does this just mean that my point is "moot" and therefore redundant?
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Sun has always served a niche market. The problem is that commodity X86 hardware, coupled with a decent OS, is making their niche smaller and smaller. Eventually commodity hardware/software will be capable of doing everything in that niche.
Sun needs to find ways to move into other markets. Retreating is not the strategy of a company that will "be around for a long time".
One place that I *always* see Sun boxes are Oracle instances. All of the big (3+ terabyte of data) instances I've seen are always running on Sun. I'm guessing that Oracle's version of their products on Sun are the most stable & most efficient. Hell, if things got bad enough, Sun could team up with Oracle and make dedicated boxes. I think that they'd do very well.
uhhhh.....
i hate it when people are so foolish about stats.
if you read the Netcraft FAQ you'll find that
many OS's (AIX, OSX, Solaris, NetBSD, Linux and yes even current editions of FreeBSD) reset their uptime to zero after 497 days, so even if they had been going longer, it won't show on Netcraft.
You should look at stats more carefully before drawing conclusions.
Is Pixar still owned by Steve Jobs? Shouldn't they be using xserve? how 'bout some NEXT servers? why not an Apple ][ ? (just kidding on that last one....) Not that the servers they are using now are bad, its just that there has to be a reason Steve's company isnt using his computers. Just a thought.
I'll bet that people will claim that they can tell when a scene has been rendered with SUN, and when a scene is rendered with Intel. Just like the ass's that claim they can tell the difference between a song played through a Tube Amp, and one in a modern one. Modern sounds better... just as intel rocks.
>> I'd love to see their electrical bill...
Not only that, but they'll get a lot of fans!
ive heard trolls like that before... cant you come up with something new? Youre not even a good troll... eww...
one is a High Density Clustering Solutions Company,
one is a Webhosting Company.
News.com got it wrong earlier tonight, but they have fixed the link.
Http://www.racksaver.com/
fyi Most of the best movies rendering CGI are RackSaver Cluster customers.
check them out amazing GFLOPS per $.
Killmode
They farm out all of their R&D in the form of browsing the latest offerings from Taiwanese system integrators. That R&D budget buys hookers and pays engineers who muddle the power connectors on each new motherboard.
So saying Sun spends 10 times more than that ain't saying much.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
-OR-
I'd love to see a Beowulf cluster of BabyMakers!
Yes!And why you are the only reader to notice it? /. readers read all articles!
Because neither
Sun Microsystems will overhaul most its server line and cut prices Monday in an effort to show that it's got enough research power to stay competitive, even with today's depressed spending.
p art=rss&tag=feed&subj=news
http://rss.com.com/2100-1001-983913.html?type=pt&
I don't remember it exactly or have a link handy... But I remember the computer system in the early Airbus aircraft consisted of four machines, each with two halves. While each of the four machines had specialised tasks, each was nevertheless capable of doing the others' tasks in case of malfunction; each computer ran different code for the same task. Furthermore, the two halves of each computer ran different code and the halves constantly monitored each other -- if results differed, another computer took over the failing task. So there was pretty good error checking and system redundancy.
Why the early Airbus planes do lead the disaster charts has mainly to do with pilot interface. It was possible to accidentally have the aircraft in "Cruise mode" or "Takeoff mode" at landing, and there was no loud and clear warning system -- this led to some crashes. Another related issue was the abundance of numerical information in place of the traditional round gauges -- you didn't notice a problem so quickly (at a glance), if at all. [Again no linkage, I read this in a book on aircraft disasters.] Due to poor interface design, the aircraft were very prone to human error, despite all the safeguarding automation.
Moot point, though. Obviously Boeing won't employ WinXP in the aircraft but firmly on the ground.
The IT people I talked to were surprisingly happy with XP so far.
What is so sad about this is that Windows XP still is nowhere as robust as Solaris 8 or 9. When I use Windows XP and 2000, they still feel very much like Microsoft made them (inconsistent behaviors, applications can still crash them, etc.). On the other hand, I beat the hell out of Solaris 8 at work (CAD development), and it takes it without a whimper. My only downtime is scheduled maintenance. I can tell from experience that Sun follows better software engineering procedures than Microsoft (at least for their OS kernel). Also, even Linux is better than Win XP and Win 2K (I used Linux extensively while in college and was very pleased).
The only advantages to Windows are the Microsoft sales pitch and Office. Both have limited days ahead of them...mainly due to Linux and OpenOffice.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
However, their site says RenderMan now offers raytracing as an additional tool for effects. (While it's still a scanline renderer.)
What it REALLY means is that Apple is dying.
I mean, with SJ as CEO of both Pixar AND Apple, you'd think he'd buy up a buttload of X-Serves, and run Darwin. . .
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
... e?
Also look up the "KLAT" cluster supersomputer. It has a very cleverly routed, efficient network, with only three (IIRC) NICs per box.
They understood not everything has to connect to everything else. Wonder if their method is doable on a rack blade server?
Last time I read up on Google, their data stores were diskless. All the data was in memory because disk I/O was too slow. Sounds like some actual fact finding is in order.
-AC
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