HP & Commodity Computing

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.

Comments

Grid-Computing?

[fembots]

Is this considered grid computing (which enables the sharing, selection, and aggregation of a wide variety of geographically distributed computational resources)? All processing seems to come from one source, more like lease-computing?

One of the articles mentioned "All the animators are independently funded to make their films.", but none mentioned the cost to use 1 unit (however it's calculated) of the processing power. How do animators justify the expenses to sponsors?

Wonder what they do with their "idle" CPU cycles

[xmas2003]

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! ;-)

How about security

[wheelbarrow]

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.

True Grid Computing

[Doesn't_Comment_Code]

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.

We keep it busy

[steve_l]

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.

Xgrid for UNIX

[not_hylas( )]

"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