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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 ...
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.
Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S
-we don't believe 'YOU-
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!
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.
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No he didn't.
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
Surely they used Token Ring to connect them ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Nasty fat hobbit probably sold the extra RAM to buy Twinkies(R)
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
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
The time when we need in excess of 640 GB or RAM will be closer than you think. I give it 5 years absolute tops. Probably less.
:)
Depends on how early they get Longhorn out the door, I guess
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
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
Buy a good 1U rack. Sit it on your desk. Instant "Pizzabox" desktop.
I don't have time to comment my code, the program is late already.
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.
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.