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Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital

Posted by timothy on from the route-bits-through-mordor dept.

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.

3 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Distributed.net... by Motherfucking+Shit · · Score: 5, Informative
    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.
    This was already tried, by a company called ProcessTree. The idea was that they'd sell your CPU cycles out and you'd get a cut. They also had it set up in a pyramid fashion, so that you also got an extra few cents for each person you referred to the program.

    The best I could find was this mirror of the FAQ. Since ProcessTree.com now belongs to a domain poacher, I'm guessing they never did find a paying client...
    --
    "BSD: Free as in speech. Linux: Free as in beer. Windows 10: Free as in herpes." --Man On Pink Corner in #52607549.
  2. Re:Maybe they're right by slash-tard · · Score: 5, Informative

    Xeons only go up to 4 megs of cache and those were just recently released. At the time these were bought the max was 2 megs.

  3. Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this by QuantumFTL · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out http://www.worley.com/fprime.html

    My part-time employer (when I'm not working for NASA/JPL) Maas Digital just bought a copy of the software... it utilizes stochastic methods to allow flexible real-time raytrace rendering (with good motion blur!)

    It turns out that motion blur in 3D graphics is a very hard problem because it's essentially a high-dimensional integral, and it turns out the best method of doing generalized high-dimensional numerical integration is a stochastic algorithm (monte carlo method) so it's not surprising to me that it's a great way to do motion blurs.

    My favorite aspect of stochastic methods is their ability to be continuously refined (for instance, in a video game, the longer you spent looking at an object, the better it would get etc, and the graphics performance would degrade very smoothly with changes in system load etc). It is also ideal for parallel processing, as it can be dynamically parallelized to completely heterogeneous computing nodes.

    Dan and I agree that there's going to be a lot of stochastic algorithms in the future of computer graphics (though he is hopeful that analytical methods will eventually make a comeback, as they have better asymptotic performance).

    Cheers,
    Justin Wick