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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 ;)
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.
For around $25,000 you too can make Pixar quality movies
...plus the several million $ for the creative talent!
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.
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.