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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 ;)
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.
worst... reply... ever...
Since when do you take what's in ()'s to be the main idea of the post? I was asking how much of an improvement these servers were over Sun servers, and threw the Beowulf cluster thing in as a joke.
Critical Bastard.
For around $25,000 you too can make Pixar quality movies
...plus the several million $ for the creative talent!
I've said it before and I'll say it again: you are not paying for cutting-edge hardware when you buy an Apple. You are paying for easy to use software. Movie production houses which have teams of professional administrators do not need the handholding that OSX Server would provide.
--sdem
isn't
720 hours @ 75,776W = 54,558,720kWh.
actually 54,558,720Wh (watt-hours, not kilowatt hours), which is 54,558kWh
making it not 3.2million, but only $3200 a month?
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.
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.
According to the article: Intel, Sun and AMD submitted bids, Intel won. Apple did not submit a bid. If you don't bid on a contract, don't expect to win it.
Pixar is looking for the most processing power money can buy. Everyone knows except for a few specific cases Apple hardware is slower then offerings containing Intel or AMD processors. What Apple is good for is pretty interfaces and easy of use, both of which are pretty useless in a renderfarm.
Since Jobs is CEO at both Pixar and Apple, we can sure of the fact Apple knew Pixar was shopping for a new server. Jobs being CEO at both would raise conflict of interest charges, if Pixar went with Apple hardware.
Xserver is also targeted at smaller markets, specifically ones that don't have an army of support workers.
I agree. I think whats going to end up happening long term is Windows will take and keep the desktop (I just don't see it happening with Linux, this coming from someone whose used it as his only OS at home for ten years), Linux in the datacenter, and OS-X in the same niche role its in now, with the caveat that I think it'll start pulling away the tiny percentage of people who want to run Unix on their desktop.
Ten years running Linux, and tomorrow morning I'm dropping the bills on one of those spiffy gigahertz 17" iMacs. I want Unix, and I want more functional stability than Linux has ever given me (not OS stability, but stability in terms of what programs I can use to do what, what works with what else, etc... )
I rather suspect that their Intel blade system is cramming in more than 2 CPUs per rack unit on average. Apple may yet try a 4 CPU per U configuration, but the current Xserve ain't it. FWIW, 2 x 1.25Ghz G4s would put up a FAIRLY good showing against a single P4 2.8... but 1024 Xserves would take up 1024 rack Units - /48 would give over 21 full racks - a lot of space!
That was classic intercourse!
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,
I use Linux on my desktop. It's great. It's beautiful. But it's *still not ready* for the desktop - as in, it's still not ready to compete with Windows - because it's still more comparable with Windows 3.1 than it is with Windows XP.
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.Maybe my viewpoint is narrow. Or maybe I'm as big a power user as you can get without actually *thinking* in C.
Note that I administer my own domain on a server farm of Linux and OpenBSD machines which live in my bedroom.
Primarily, my main desktop is an e-mail drone. If Evolution actually worked (ie. didn't take 8 minutes to exit on my machine), then it would be fine. But without a spellchecker competitive to prevalent software, Linux/KDE or Linux/Gnome doesn't even make a good e-mail drone. The spellchecker is so 1995. I want an underlining spell checker.
Does that give me a narrow viewpoint, because I expect features which I could take for granted among the apps of more estabished operating systems? Apparently.
Your lack of a realistic viewpoint and your immediate dismissal of my page as FUD is symptomatic of what is wrong with the Linux/OS community, and why I'm starting to believe that Linux will never be able to get its shit together enough to be more of a fringe group like Apple users.
Try using Windows 2000 or XP sometime. Look at it from a user's perspective - you know, the sort of idiot who opens e-mail virii and who makes the *bulk* of the computer-using public. From that perspective, Windows is great. It does everything reasonably well, whether you're a newbie or expert. Linux doesn't do that yet, and therefore isn't as good a desktop solution as Windows.
I'm waiting for the day someone can prove me wrong, but until you get some actual real-world experience with what end-users want from their operating systems, you'll still just be a whiny 14-year-old living in Mommy and Daddy's basement.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Funny, I've administered IRIX, HP/UX, Solaris, SunOS over the past 13 years....and after administering (and doing systems & application programming) for Linux for the past 4 years, I haven't found it to be less reliable than the others. In fact, I note that MORE patches for security and reliability are required for the proprietary OS's than Linux (those "monster patch" CD's for Solaris are HUGE, man!). Also, I see many of the huge proprietary vendors of operating systems are now SELLING Linux, as it erodes the market for their closed source OS offerings.
I would predict that Linux will destroy AIX, IRIX and HP/UX.....and Sun's planned weak CPU offerings for the next 3-4 years will make running Solaris very unattractive.
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.
They use Linux instead of Solaris because the platform is cheaper, thus increasing their profits. Their parent company is opposed to the DVD aspects of Linux because they believe it will reduce their profits. There's no irony there, just a consistent focus on making money.
If you look closely you'll find that no major company supports GPL'd software out of principle, they all do it to make more money.