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.

Comments

Imagine

[Anonymous Coward]

A beowulf .. oh wait ...

Cost?

[nb caffeine]

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.

Pizza-delivery!

[The_Ace666]

Now where can I find a pizza-delivery company to get one of these babies delivered to my door?

Re:Pizza-delivery!

[DigiShaman]

Either way, they'll be hot! (pun intended)

Wow

[KU_Fletch]

A whole 6 megabytes of memory?! Way to beat up my 486.

Update

[hlopez]

Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S
-we don't believe 'YOU-

I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

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? :)

Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this

[troon]

I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so.

Just give it six years or so, and you should see the improvements you are waiting for.

Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this

[Viceice]

you know, if you ONLY wanted so SEE something like that, you could go out doors and look for a field covered in sunflowers.

Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this

[QuantumFTL]

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

One thing to say...

[linuxkrn]

seti@home!

Re:One thing to say...

[MagicDude]

No, we need something nerdier and more useless, like the biggest prime number ever.

Re:One thing to say...

[CGP314]

folding@home

I used to run seti@home instead of folding@home, but then one day I realized I needed to switch. While finding extraterrestrial life would be the most important development in human history to date, the chances of finding it in my lifetime are very small.

On the other hand, the chances of my getting cancer or any of the other of the diseases folding@home works on is very great. Plus, if folding@home cures any of these diseases, it will extend my life and increase the chances that extraterrestrials will be found within my lifetime.


-Colin

Re:One thing to say...

[CGP314]

Using your backassward logic, it seems more logical to devote your CPU time to researching automotive traffic patterns, so you don't get killed in an auto accident or get hit by a bus.

If there was a project that I could devote my CPU cycles that could reduce the possibility of me getting into a car accident, then I would drop folding@home for dontgethitbyacar@home. What's backassward about risk assesment?


-Colin

Distributed.net...

[rthille]

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.

Re:Distributed.net...

[bobthemonkey13]

Better yet, let's make a program that makes you pay, has ads, and forces you to donate CPU cycles.

We could call it KaZaA.

Re:Distributed.net...

[Motherfucking Shit]

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...

Re:6 megabytes?

[harlows_monkeys]

Bill Gates said it best...

No he didn't.

I'm signing up right now!

[teamhasnoi]

I'm going to re-fake the moon landing, but do it right this time! No numbers on rocks, no waving flag, or overlapped crosshairs.

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.

Maybe they're right

[ctr2sprt]

Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S: The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.

They might mean 6MB of L2 cache. I don't know what cache sizes are available for Xeons, but probably when you order 1000 CPUs at once Intel are willing to give you hard-to-find stuff.

Re:Maybe they're right

[slash-tard]

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.

Renderfarms online - old news

[Anonymous Coward]

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

LAN Connection ?

[ultranova]

Surely they used Token Ring to connect them ?

Nasty hobbits. They tricked us! Thieves!

[pariahdecss]

Nasty fat hobbit probably sold the extra RAM to buy Twinkies(R)

Sell 'em on e-bay

[GloomE]

Wouldn't they make more by selling them as (framed) collector's items?
Blade 1 of 500: current bid $1(insert zeros here).

interconnect

[painehope]

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".

Re:interconnect

[2megs]

Rendering digital video is about as parallel as compute loads get. Generally each frame can be an independent computation. For most ray-tracing algorithms, computing each pixel of each frame is fully parallelizable too.

The global AI things they did to have 10,000 troops all interacting together is obviously not quite so independent, but I'm willing to be the bulk of the compute load goes into creating pictures of those interactions, not the interactions themselves.

Re:interconnect

[sakusha]

You obviously have never worked in CG. Many common, simple effects cannot be parallelized. For example, Maya's particle effects are notorious for their inability to be parallelized and run on render farms, if they use randomness (and most particle fx do use randomness in positioning). Those fx must be rendered sequentially on a single CPU. Each frame's particle positions are used to calculate the next frame's particle positions, they're all calculated at runtime.

Re:interconnect

[sakusha]

That's a very complex subject, but it boils down to this: there's no technical reason you can't precalculate all the particle positions over time, but that's not how they did it in Maya.

Let's say for example, you set a particle generator to run 60 frames, emitting smoke from a point, like from a cigarette tip. Smoke particles start emitting on frame 1, and continue on their path, particles persist through frame 60 as they drift upwards in a path influenced by random air currents. If you roll forward to frame 30 and render the last half only, you start all over with no smoke from the first 30 frames, it starts from scratch, they emit right from the tip in a new smoke trail, there's no history of past particle movement. So you'd get a huge discontinuity if you rendered the frames in batches.
As far as I can tell, the actual image rendering doesn't influence the positions of the particles. It's just that they're calculated sequentially as each frame is rendered. Yeah, it's a huge pain and there aren't many good workarounds. But that's what you have to work with in order to use the particle generators, which are hugely powerful. Its the worst possible method, except for everything else anyone's ever thought of.

Re:6 Gigabytes on a 32bit CPU?

[Xpilot]

Well, initially 32-bit Intel chips could only address 4GB's, but recently we have crazy shit like PAE that allows up to 16GB RAM to be installed and addressed by the OS that supports it, but applications can still only use 4GB at a time.

no reason to doubt 6GB

[Anonymous Coward]

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

STOP THAT 6MB LAME JOKES

[robbyjo]

Please...

This may be an old news, but the details of that machine is here. That's some stuff to drool over. Some excerpts:

... provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of nearline storage as a global storage repository ...

... create and manage up to 100TB of data ...

And now this machine is up for a rent. Here's the company website.