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Sun Donation Spurs Linux Cluster at Purdue
An anonymous reader writes "Purdue University, with a $3.6 million gift from Sun Microsystems, is giving recycled PCs new life as a computer cluster that makes high-performance computing power available in undergraduate classes. 'Previously, my students could only do what I'd describe as 'proof' animations - small, low-resolution and not presentation quality,' [Professor Richard] Paul said. 'With access to this computing power, the students will be able to ship their software files of instructions to the Linux cluster, and it will come back in three or four hours with modeling, lighting and animation. Students will get to experience the whole thing in terms of scale and presence, and they can do longer animations.' More images of the current Linux cluster and other servers at Purdue are out there."
These are recycled PCs? They all look identical
Donating all that equipment and no Solaris operating system ?
I have always wondered if there was a business model - conceptually similar to Akamai speeding up the "last hop" delivery - where all the computation intensive files for 3D modelling etc could be sent, and the the end product shipped back.
... maybe a service where computation power, which is routinely available in most universities, can be made available to non-students may have a business value. They ship the files to the computation center which can then do the rendering and ship it back in a few minutes (rather than 24 hours) to the graphic artist ...
A lot of my friends doing 3D modeliing would do the stuff and then have to let the rendering take place for 24 plus hours
Of course the business will disappear if grid computing, or something based on the P2P infrastructure can be succesfully established, but till that time maybe there is a business model here.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
Seeing that this is something near and dear to me (having built and ran render farms) I would love to know more information on what they are using to manage the renders... what batch queueing software, what render software, what animation and modelling software? I would love to know how they approached the problem.
My experience in the past was with Maya covering all the 3d and LSF from Platform for the queue management. Wrote some perl scripts for the frontend and for the backend of the system, did some database calls so that people could resubmit jobs if they failed without having to look up all the settings agin, also forced some uniformity to how it was submitted...
I know that student projects aren't the same as feature films or half hour animations, and managing for 60 artits on 500 procs is not the same as keeping students rendering, but it is still the same basic task.
And a bit of advice from somebody who runs such systems for a living... Just because the horsepower is there and it seems like you will be the only one using the system, if you can spend a few more minutes optimizing the models and the textures, it is worth it. Also take advantage of using layers and simple A over B composites. It will save you time in the long run, and it is possible that others may hit crunch time the same time you do. Computer resources are finite. Anything you can do to use as little of it as possible makes it easier for everybody to make deadlines. And if you do make it into the industry, it will be even more valuable, because your stuff with go through with less problems, and be less costly, and people notice that.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
I had the same thought, but I would imagine the working setup would be a little more secure than I believe you meant:
-Student would be logged in at a station, and submit a job which, if approved, would be sent off to another machine and queued for processing at the master node.
-Job results would end up at the user's home directory, or users will mount their job directory on a rendering NAS where the finished jobs end up. Of course it would be more complex than this -- but the user should be able to log off after submitting the job, and pick it up later as desired. Abandoned jobs are just removed after n days..
I think this is a tremendous gift, the students will go farther than they could have earlier, it fosters creativity. Also a great way to re-use this hardware.
After looking at this picture i see a zip drive, floppy, and cdrom in every computer. I can understand a cdrom and maybe a floppy but why does EVERY computer in that cluster need a zip drive? seems like a waste of $ to me