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Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital
An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
Shoulden't that read 6GB?
A beowulf .. oh wait ...
The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 megabytes of memory."
umm check your stats there
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
Mildly off topic, but I seriously miss good pizzabox desktop boxes. Something simple, plain, fast, and with room for a couple of PCI slots on a riser card.
The world needs more of them
What would this cost? Do they charge something like cpu/hours or the like? Will the average person have the ability to rent some clock cycles? I just want something that will be able to run doom3 when it comes out.
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Now where can I find a pizza-delivery company to get one of these babies delivered to my door?
A whole 6 megabytes of memory?! Way to beat up my 486.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
Six whole megabytes? That's like, ten times 640K, and everyone knows that's all anyone needs!
Did the article mean 6 gigabytes? Or a 6MB cache, or what?
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
this reminds me of this.
Less look fast, more go fast.
Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S
-we don't believe 'YOU-
Less than one minute after posting the story, and not proofreading it. There is an update correcting an obivious mistake. I'm surprised that you corrected it that quickly.
A Fatal OE Exception has occurred, Sig will now reboot.
I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so. I'd like to see these machines, which rendered Lord of the Rings, use their nearly unlimited processing power to let me play a game -- perhaps Half-Life or Quake 2 with a new rendering DLL -- to spit out 60fps of pure ray-traced bliss.
:)
Or just fire up InTrace with a scene of 1 billion polygons of a super-detailed scene of sunflowers, with multiple reflections and all the other goodies, and crank it to 1600x1200.
I can dream, can't I?
Finally a computer able to run the super-ulta-mega high detail Duke Nukem forever! Yes, that's right, the game is finished and just waiting for the computer graphics and processing worlds to catch up to it.. err, right? I mean.. Doom 3! err.. wait.. bah.. Never mind that Still, I would think that unless a company needed results very quickly a seti like application would be much cheaper. If the software guys can code one that can run on the company's network overnight or just at random downtime during the day, then the company ought to save a bunch of money. If they can make it pretty and flash like SETI, then other people might even use it. It just makes more sense to save money in a non-critical manor like that.
seti@home!
While renting out unused machines is not even close to a new thing, it's the LoTR machines, so it's way cool here on /.
This is what all that "on demand" hype is about after all... *yawn*
but machines with that much memory in each aren't the norm, so it is a rather sweet cluster.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
ugh. enough already. shouldnt it be:
1: 640k
2: ???
3: PROFIT!
or
imagine a beowulf cluster of 640k!
or
litigous 640k
or
goat640k.cx
or
in soviet russia, 640k needs no more than you!
maybe i read slashdot too much, but i just see the same crap moderated "funny" all the time...
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
to dual G5 Xserves!
Imagine distributed.net being a CPU co-op. They take problems from clients in need of a ton of CPU, farm it out to distributed.net members, and at the end of the month/year you get a small check for all the CPU cycles you spent helping solve problems.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
No he didn't.
6 megabytes ought to be enough for anyone
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I may have to re-release the Mars landing too, depending on how well they did...
Beagle was a great idea, btw. Spend the money and then oops! no mission to render. Sheer genius.
Posting anon as I have an interest in some of these companies :
http://www.respower.com/ - 250+ machines (~500GHz), 250GB ram
http://www.rendercore.com/ - 700 machines
http://www.render-it.co.uk/ - 82 cpus (131GHz), 82GB ram)
The only 'interesting' thing here is that it's WETA's farm. Other than that, I doubt they offer the wide selection of software (lest they struck deals lately) not to mention field experience with 'oddball' files.
Good luck to them, though
It would be interesting to hear out to anyone that might have really tried such a combination - Xeon with let say 8MB RAM(existence?)..
"It blazingly fast.. but it ran out of memory during bootup.. using kernel 1.2.."
Hey, that's my password you are typing
Some PCs, mostly older systems used to help create the first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, have been donated to a local school.
Those machines would still have to be pretty good, even if they are called 'older systems'.. Some of the local school geeks would love to think they are working on a machine that may have been used to create Gollum!
Live in your skin. Keep changing the scenery.
Surely they used Token Ring to connect them ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Slashdot needs a -1: Tired Old Joke mod like I need to get laid.
Nasty fat hobbit probably sold the extra RAM to buy Twinkies(R)
So you DON'T need to get laid.
"No, no, I meant nobody would ever need more than 640 gigabytes of memory!!!"
If you've got renderman set up to render to disk, and your disk arrays are pretty fast, I don't see any reason why these dedicated render machines shouldn't have only 6 megabytes of RAM per CPU.
okay, it doesn't make a -ton- of sense to render direct to disk, but maybe it can be done and not require so much RAM?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Correct me if I'm wrong here but aren't the Xeons currently 32 bit? Doesn't that mean they can't address more than 4 Gigs? I thought that's what the whole big deal was with 64 bit. Now maybe if they were G5s...
Wouldn't they make more by selling them as (framed) collector's items?
Blade 1 of 500: current bid $1(insert zeros here).
the real killer is that there's quite a few industries that can't rent time on their cluster because the gigabit interconnect ( IBM blade chassis have a switch module internal to each chassis, and I don't think you can get any HSLL - high-speed, low-latency - network interconnect modules ( Myrinet, SCI, Quadrics, etc. ) for them ) has too high of a latency for their applications.
Bandwidth-wise they should be fine, as each chassis has at least four ports that could be trunked to a top-level switch w/ a beefy backplane ( I could tell you the # of ports per chassis if I was at work, as I've been messing w/ some of their blades lately ), giving a peak per-chassis bw of > 400 MB/sec.
Of course, I'm wondering how Weta got around it themselves, as I would think that rendering digital video is fairly heavy on inter-node communication. This would still be aswesome for web-servers or problems that are "embarassingly parallel".
PC moderators can suck my White pierced, tattooed dick. If you think pride == hate, s/dick/Aryan meat mallet/g.
The IBM HS20 has 4 DIMM slots used in banks of 2. No reason to think 2x2GB and 2x1GB would not work.
Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 2000 AS would support PAE allowing an app to use close to 4GB, leaving 2 GB for OS kernel , so seems reasonable.
Ay one who doesent believe me check at crucial.com. I wont provide a URL but look for IBM, Bladecenter, HS20
Massive.
Now you can rent their software and pay them to run it for you on their cluster. None too shabby.
Maybe they can't make a crappy episode of Triping the Rift lowering expectations everywhere. I can't tell you how disappointing that is. But if you need an army of anything, they're probably the people to call.
I'll have the one on the left.
You don't need a lab to make mud.
Please...
This may be an old news, but the details of that machine is here. That's some stuff to drool over. Some excerpts:
And now this machine is up for a rent. Here's the company website.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
6 [gigabytes?]
To do that, they'd have to be 64 bit machines and I dont think they are. Maybe it was originally intended to read '600 megabytes'.
that's why PJ is so keen to get those Oscars home. We are gonna melt them down for more processing power...
Maybe it's 6MB of L2 or other on-CPU high-speed cache. An odd number, but it makes a lot more sense than any other explanation I can think of.
I'm betting it's another marketroid amalgamation... something along the lines of:
"1MB of L1 cache and 2MB of L2 cache per processor, for a total of 6MB per machine!"
Just like those old '64 bit!' console advertisements. Uhh, yeah, 16 bits pipeline times three pipelines plus two extra 8-bit memory thingamajiggies may add up to 64 bits, but it for damn sure isn't a 64-bit machine.
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
See its true !!
.
we dont need these bloated memory sizes
if programmers would all write cleaner tighter code
we all would only need six megs !!
if the rings can be done six
windows can be done 4
linux in 2
and our apps would only need 512K
our games 1 or 2 megs
six megs
it was good enough to play xcom !! it should be good enough play DOOM III damn it
you hear that john !! i want my doom cramed into six megs !!
if they can cram gollum into 6 freaking sticks
i want eve online starwars galaxies everquest doom III and halflife II all running while i poke around in excel spread sheets
its time we computer users stand up to bloated overly commented crappy code !!
i want my six megs to generate me Gladriel
and the 7 drawfs
call corsair to day and DEMAND your
hyper X dual ddr 5000 xms twin 3 meggers with lcd's today !!!
Music the Paint dancefloor the canvas your body the brush
Isn't 6 Mb of memory enough for a cluster?
to develop the military tactics used in the battle scenes. Cavelry charge (with lances) against infantry dug into rocks and buildings. Most inept castle defence ever devised. Etc etc. I assume it was all worked out on an unplugged (insert archaic/obscure home computer).
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Just think of the fun you could have with that bit though..flipping it at random from time to time..making big hollywood movies go late and over-budget.
I mean, if you're tired of waiting and everything.
Deleted
"The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em."
Why not? What's so hard to belive about that? Considering how much that movie sucked, I'm amazed it's that MUCH! And besides, why would they use more powerfull computers when all they're doing is some silly kid's film.
The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
I don't blame you, why would anyone want more than 640k?
Off topic, but along the same lines if your post... I'm getting SO tired of seeing computer ads for computers with 256/512/1024/whatever millibit (mb) of memory instead of MegaByte (MB). Before we got into the GHz range for CPU's, it was...well, since the unit 'hz' doesn't exist, I would have to assume they meant 450/550/650/whatever milliHertz (mhz). *sigh*
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
A great idea in theory, but how would they track the amount of help that you did in a way that would be one hundred percent hack proof?
Obfuscate the work being done and insert test/checking operations between the 'real' work operations. Verify that the results of the test operations were what would be expected if they had been carried out.
Do not reveal what the test operations are (or even what the 'real' work is). Do not reveal what percentage of operations are test operations. Change the test operations arbitrarily. Note any discrepancies immediately, and check recent results supplied from that source.
It wouldn't be 100% hack-proof, but it would be a major PITA to hack; since you are only being asked to carry out a set of operations without knowing what they are, the payers can change obfuscation algorithms, and the nature/quantity of test/check routines around any time they like, *without notice*.
If this is done, the major weakness would be payers getting lazy; i.e. not altering the nature of the check routines, or using weak/consistent obfuscation.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
occupy weta servers and stop the rendering of the sure to be vomit inducing evangelion live action movie. wont some one please think of the "children"?!?
The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
When you are expressing two complete thoughts (that could stand on their own as sentences) in one sentence, you separate them with a semicolon.
Like this: The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory; we don't believe 'em.
That it's currently just being used to play solitaire and minesweeper?
WHO corrects everyone's grammer...
640K was enough for anybody in 1981.
That's like me saying now "1GB of RAM should be enough for anybody." I didn't say "ever."
You might get a bit more respect for your opinion if you spelled things like "defense" and "cavalry" correctly.
Either way, it was a lot of action. Sieges are not action. They're not fun. They were usually months of nothing. Bombardments and nothing else are also not fun. They lost appeal after about 60 seconds. They're not what movie-goers want. Besides, the orcs had the advantage of overwhelming numbers. Who cares if a lot of them died, as long as enough of them didn't?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
We're waiting...
As I've pointed out before, if there was a market for this, ISPs would be selling off-peak CPU time on their hosting farms.
Alternately, since the two thoughts are closely related(the second needing the first for context to make any worthwhile statement), the second clause could be phrased as a dependent clause, thus:
"The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, but we don't believe 'em."
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
Darn. Must get one of those modern dictionary books. There could have been better use made of the castle and the defenders and STILL have them overwhelmed. This would have been more exciting, more 'realistic' and less annoying.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
Although WETA did not buy the option, Myrinet interconnect *IS* available for the IBM BladeCenter.
For WETA the standard GigE interconnect would have been price/performance cheaper since rendering is more a batch style job then a parallel job which would have benefitted more from such a high-speed low-latency interconnect.
Funny - Definately.
Offtopic - Maybe.
...but redundant??? What is this, free crack for mods day? Mod this post funny or underrated - PLEASE!!!!
Be careful! Bears shouldn't consume large furry dogs.