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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."
'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
I'm sure glad he didn't use an arcane technical word like "program". That sure would have confused the layman. By the way, how many Libraries of Congress can the cluster store?
In addition to the Sun Mircosystems gift, Morgan J. Burke, director of intercollegiate athletics, will announce a $1.2 million gift from Cisco Systems Inc. that is enabling Purdue sports fans to access real-time football game data via wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs)
havent they heard of a little device called an AM radio?
We played dungeons and dragons for 3 hours.....then i was slain by an elf
They're SGI Onyx 2 computers, something like an Octane with a lot more upgradability. you wouldn't be able to fit multiple Infinite Reality 2 pipelines in an Octane... You can find them here, though I wouldn't want to pay the power bill for one:
http://www.sgi.com/products/remarketed/onyx2/
GPL: Free as in will
Interesting...like what used to happen with print jobs. How long 'til a student goes to the sysadmin on duty asking for their animation job to be niced down a point or two?
Carousel is a lie!
I have a good friend who is a CG major at Purdue. There were always difficulties in trying to get even simple animation projects rendered in a timely manner. This is a great resource for students who are really trying to get their projects done in a snap, who can see the results of their efforts a little sooner than a full day later.
2 racks of "Origin 2000" super computer nodes.
1 rack of "Onyx 2" visualization nodes
It's questions like these that the high resolution pics are designed to answer. Gaze upon those blinking lights, mere mortal.
There are companies that provide render resources. They are great if you are a small studio and only go to final render once ever so often. They are expensive if they are your only resourse.
For a past project, we priced out outsourcing our final renders and discovered that it would have cost us $6M to render on $1M worth of hardware for about 4 months. Prices may have changed since. We dropped the money and brought in 400 boxes because we could have reused the machines for future projects.
But studios of 10-20 people, its not a bad idea. When it hits crunch time, its always good to have a couple hundred extra machines to get stuff done.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
You can use Maya 5 or 3dsmax 5. You submit the jobs via specific lab computers and get email notification when the job begins and finishes rendering.
More details are available at pete.purdue.edu.
These ITAP (formerly PUCC) clusters are in the Math buidling. You're thinking of some of the ECE clusers in the MSEE machine room and in MSEE214. We still have those too, but they're limited to ECE research use (i.e., me!).
The guy who ran the cluster in Civil (Moffett, quoted in the article) moved over to ITAP and helped start this thing about 1.5 years ago or so.
As far as I know, the donation from Sun had nothing to do with creating this cluster--that's just media spin. It may have something to do with growing it or new applications, but the cluster has been around for a while. It was created to help offload work from the IBM SP, which had a multi-week wait for CPU time until they brought the recycled machines online.
The idea is pretty solid though. Purdue gets rid of computer lab machines every 2-3 years, and rather than sending them off to salvage (literally a dump), they stick them in a machine room and use Condor/PBS to schedule jobs. Very useful to those of us grad students who need a lot of CPU throughput to do work. And believe me, a lot more than just rendering projects is going on--folks from many departments use these things.
And since the university has it's own power plant, it doesn't have to pay retail prices for the elctricity that runs them (or anything else).
For those who are stat-hungry, this system currently has about 700 total CPUs on the main system, all Pentium IIs and Pentium IIIs. There's also 200 Athlons, but they're technically owned by somebody else (i.e., they're not recycled). As of right now, the 1-minute load on the main system 893 (we're pretty busy right now). There are 598 jobs awaiting CPUs. I've personally run 250 jobs today, and I'll be kicking of another 200 in about an hour (big research deadline soon).
There are several hundred more machines available for use, but they are not up yet due to lack of floor space, cooling capacity, network connections, and/or power. Much to the annoyance of those that could really use more compute time.
Why donate computers to a university, as opposed to the poor in other continents or even in own country? Just so they could have a bigger cluster for animations? In my eyes, that doesn't make sense.
What's in it for Sun?