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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.

8 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. How about security by wheelbarrow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I know that data security is a top concern in today's animated film business. This is why render farms for animated films are in secure office buildings rather than data centers. Additionally, the render farms are not networked to the internet.

    This makes me skeptical that a 'lease farm' model can work for anything more secure than things like TV Commercials.

  2. True Grid Computing by Doesn't_Comment_Code · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I just hope it is TRUE grid computing - as in following a standard communcation so that any application that is grid compliant can take advantage of the farm.

    More often than not renderfarms have a few formats that you can use (usually expensive ones) and that's it. PR-Renderman, Maya, 3dsMax, Lightwave, and a few other big ones are guaranteed to run about everywhere. Blender? Nice try, but "little" software projects like Blender don't have much of a chance at a renderfarm. Tell a renderfarm you have a Blender file to render, and that you have money in hand - they will tell you to go home.

    Grid computing is slightly less efficient than a direct rendering program since it has a little extra overhead. But the ability to run ANY program on a farm is quite enticing. That's what we should be aiming for. That is a good goal.

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    1. Re:True Grid Computing by Dracolytch · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The ability to run any program on a farm doesn't make a lot of sense.

      I've studied and worked with distributed/parallel programming. There are a lot of things you need to take into account. Your primary troubles are how to divide up the work evenly and well, especially when you're working with multiple computers at different specifications.

      So, yeah, you have Blender, and you want to distribute it... But how do you tell blender to divide up the work? Do you have another program that manages multiple installations of blender?

      Other parts of the program, usually synchronization and organization, need to be run on one (or a few) places to prevent chaos.

      That's, honestly, the easy part. If you want a good system (versus getting by on the skin of your teeth), then you also need to deal with fault-tolerance (As the number of machines increases, so does the chance of failure).

      All of this assumes that the grid is designed for speed in mind (instead of fault tolerance).

      Writing for a distributed environment requires that you re-think the way that you approach the application at hand. You litterally have to program it differently.

      If you're into software, then I highly recommend that you do some research into distributed computing. It's a really interesting field.

      ~D

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  3. Alternatives?? by eclectro · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I have yet to see a service where you can just simply buy time anonymously, upload your program, crunch the data, download the results.

    I know some might say that this might be invitation for someone to unleash zombies, but the grid does not need a connection to the internet for this kind of work, and besides that outgoing traffic can be monitored.

    I did not notice what the process was for buying computing time on the SE3D website, nor sepcifications of the grid. Am I missing something? Is this a fluff/vaporware story?

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  4. The deployment tools are OSS by steve_l · · Score: 2, Interesting
    If you point your web browser at
    SmartFrog you can read about and download the framework used to dynamically deploy the fabric management tools and the rendering apps.


    It's LGPL, Java based.


    What you are thinking about, community rendering, needs community rendering tools. Bandwidth is an issue with all these apps; the filesets are huge.

  5. Resource Allocation by steve_l · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Everyone in the project has virtual $ to buy render time; the cost of render time varies depending on demand. So, you get more rendering for your money if you time it right.

    Advanced resource allocation is one of the research projects that are keeping some people -AI and mathematicians- busy. That's things like options, auctions, etc, etc.

  6. Could work pretty well by ikekrull · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All the professional 3D apps e.g. Maya, Shake etc. are built to operate in this kind of 'decoupled rendering' environment, and render farms are probably the simplest type of 'distributed computing' - generally theyre just a bunch of independent computers on a LAN which see a shared disk on which the source materials (e.g. textures, models, motion data, imagery) is kept.

    Accounting is pretty simple too as a central dispatcher keeps track of which frame is submitted to which node, and how long it takes - it is uncommon to have 1 machine working on more than 1 frame simultaneously.

    Sun also offer this type of service, as well as others. I think it will be interesting to see if this model is adopted by hollywood etc. but I can see a lot of smaller shops taking advantage of it to acheive what would otherwise be impossible.

    I remember using a Compaq Test-Drive-Programme 4-CPU Alpha 21264 box to render a 4096x4096 cornell box using BMRT that would have taken my 128MB P3-500 an age to do.

    The model definitely works from my point of view, however I don't really think that Sun or HP will be in much of a position to actually make money out of this type of service since hardware depreciates so fast and the price people will be willing to pay would be pretty low I imagine - I guess they could simply use their unsold inventories to extract some kind of revenue from them instead of writing them off, but getting the 'volume' up to profitable levels will be a challenge.

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  7. It's utility computing by steve_l · · Score: 3, Interesting

    That is, CPU & storage is something you pay for on demand. It is distributed (two facilties, two continents), and the users are all scattered round the UK. One of the facilities is downstairs from me in Bristol; a large chilled datacentre that I dont have access to for either security or competence reasons :)

    Projects aren't charged real money for render time, do have virtual monety; cost of rendering varies depending on demand. Projects have their own balances. This lets money optimise the resource allocation. Get your design done early, render before the rest and you get more CPU time for your cash, hence better rendering.

    There are lots of other sponsors, as this is giving regional and up and coming artists/animators chances to do serious renderings on facilities they wouldn't normally get.