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HP & Commodity Computing

Posted by Hemos on from the the-grid-network-cometh dept.

Handpaper writes "The BBC has a story about HPs SE3D lab's pilot scheme to provide raw rendering power for smaller studios and amateurs. A sample movie is available.. " Yes, the long fabled "grid computing" may arrive soon on a massive scale.

3 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. Wonder what they do with their "idle" CPU cycles by xmas2003 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Since they have the hardware in place, I wonder what they do when they don't have films to make and/or work - i.e. would they consider contributing those idle CPU times to something like the Folding@HOME project ... the powder2glass team would love the work units! ;-)

    --
    Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
  2. We keep it busy by steve_l · · Score: 5, Informative

    We have things to do to keep the facility busy; its a flexible fabric and it can do interesting stuff. To be honest, pure CPU cycles is not its strength -many home computers can deliver more mips.

    What the farm(s) have is large amounts of storage near those mips, which is what you need for data-intensive computation. Large animation models is one use. data processing from things like the Large Hadron Collider another, though we wont have real data from the LHC yet.

    Now, if you have projects to run on such a fabric come talk your nearest HP sales rep.

    The stuff we do in HPLabs is focused on 'research on how to use these systems'; things like resource allocation, load balancing for thermal management, etc, etc. I'm working on distributed deployment and testing, using the datacentres and perhaps soon the PlanetLab facility, which has more distribution for interesting problems.

    If you want to play with the deployment tools, to http://smartfrog.org/ and download it. The technology is designed to make it possible to install and configure complex systems over a utility computing infrastructure.

  3. Xgrid for UNIX by not_hylas(+) · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Could someone not write something like this but open source and distributed."

    Darwin:

    http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ind ex .html

    Xgrid for UNIX:
    This article introduces the first working Xgrid agent for Linux and other Unix systems that can be integrated in any XGrid cluster (managed by OS X).

    http://unu.novajo.ca/simple/archives/000026.html

    http://developer.apple.com/hardware/hpc/xgrid_in tr o.html

    --
    ~hylas