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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 ;)
1024 xeon's? jeeze, my electric is $120/mo with one amd and one intel running half the time.
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?
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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
I'm actually a little surprised they use general purpose CPUs for this kind of task. I'd have thought that a load of custom DSPs might be faster, and probably cheaper - How about 1 DSP per pixel (About 10 million?). I'm sure that would really zip along, if they could sort out the memory access issues inherent in this kind of application. Ray tracing is perfect for parallel execution, since each pixel really is independent of each other pixel, and each frame is likewise independent.
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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.
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.
Look, the mean-time-to-failure of a hard drive is 15,000 to 20,000 hours. This means that a hard drive stops working at Goole every hour of every day. Truly 24/7.
If you were to look at their dumpster in the back alley, you'd find about 170 hard drives dunked every week.
Wouldn't you cheksum every data transfer under those conditions too?
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)
The most important linux skill is how to use internet for help, not any unix skills. For a newbie, it is a hit or miss affair. He grabs a modern desktop oriented linux, installs it in 30 or less minutes, if all of his hardware are supported and all programs newbie wants are already installed, good news, we have a new linux fan. Chances are, that won't happen.
If something goes wrong, it is best option for linux fans that newbie just forgets the idea, right then. Most probably he now has a functional system but with a non-functional usb mouse, cd burner or a sub-optimal refresh rate. He will want to fix and use the system. It is just the mouse, or the printer, or excel documents. He almost succeeded in this linux thing!
Wrong. He still misses the crucial skill.
He will try to fix it and fail, seek help and fail again, try to skim docs and fail, learn where to seek help and fail, read documents and seek help at the correct place with the correct attitude and if he has some luck, succeed at last. Now we have a brand new whiner instead fo a fan. Worse, he half knows what he is talking about.
Eveyone whines about windows all the time too, but it is not the same thing. We don't want scared potential new users. In case of windows, user already knows how much of that whining is about a real problem, that is not the case with linux.
Solution is aiming higher. Linux has to be considerably easier to use and install than windows because non-techie users just have a lot of experience with windows. Even if the fix isn't optimal, there is always a fix a phonecall to someone you know away. Linux doesn't have nearly the same installed base so is denied the luxury. Linux still requires a crucial skill; it shouldn't.
In some areas (considering desktop) linux already is better than windows and in others, it is not too far behind. But it has to better on all fronts. Till than, linux is not ready. You can argue that had market shares of linux and windows magically flipped, we would be saying windows is not ready. Probably you would be right, too. But market share (or rather, user base) has not magically flipped and that is not irrelevant.
I know, I should have read the grandparent.
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