Let's be honest here - just because you're installing the "unified driver" doesn't mean you're following the same code path under the hood for your new card vs. your 3-year-old card. It's more like a unified installer with common shared objects statically linked in and specific code for each and every GPU and special card feature. New code is added for new cards, old card-specific code is abandoned in-place. There is very little actual unification where it matters for stability - folks doing enterprise graphics support know that new drivers become unstable for old cards every time there is a major feature release. The reason companies buy a Quadro FX for twice the cost vs. a GeForce is so the manufacturer will actually fix the bugs.
TileFlow is excellent for most conventional datacenters and has served us well. Best practice in a conventional datacenter is to use TileFlow to ensure positive pressure and appropriate distribution (don't forget to model all your underfloor blockages), set up cold rows and hot rows, and then use a drop ceiling as a plenum with strategically located grates to pull the hot air back into your CRAC units. The only problem, as others have pointed out, is that it's only a 2D model presently and you really need to start modelling your load in 3D when you get past around 12kW/rack.
We've speculated that if we were to start all over again we'd skip the raised floor and do a bi-level drop ceiling with one level being cold air distribution to cold rows and the other level being the hot air return. Let cold air fall and warm air rise, and augment it all with XDO's from Liebert.
Speaking as someone from Dreamworks, I can tell you that it works incredibly well for us. But that's all I can say - you have to be able to figure out what the best platform is for your needs based on your own criteria, which should probably include:
ISV support. You should ask your ISV's how well their products work and how well they are supported. You should ask them what hardware and distributions they use to QA their applications.
Development environment for in-house code. GNU C++, STL compliance, and ATI/NVIDIA OpenGL support is pretty much just catching up to and is now ready to surpass SGI's support now. Java support has been far superior on Linux for years. What do you write your apps in?
IHV support. We picked a hardware vendor that had UNIX graphics desktop experience and was actively applying that experience to Linux. They pick supportable graphics cards and spend lots of time qualifying drivers for customer environments. You too can then ask them for help in working through the inevitable graphics and desktop bugs. There aren't many IHV's that can offer this.
Absolutely, positively have multiple vendors come in with their graphics workstations and then proceed to evaluate how well your critical applications can run. Expect this process to take months.
Finally, I'm not sure how large and mature your present environment is, but if you're talking about more than a few seats and two or three apps, expect a transition that takes a long time. Let people run their O2's next to their Linux boxes. Eventually, if you give the Linux systems proper care and feeding, you'll see dust start to collect on the O2's. Then, and only then, have you successfully completed your transition.
Agreed. You're biting off more than you can chew. You'd be absolutely insane to throw away your Solaris infrastructure on day one. Quality will sell your ideas, and consistency is the one true measure for quality. Work with your sysadmin staff to make Linux a first-tier quality desktop. Don't go cheap. Let Linux and Solaris compete on equal terms, and it will be easy to pick a winner.
Do you have all of your ISV's lined up? Getting all of the software pulled together that you need to be productive at your job is the hardest part. Are you there? If you're not, you might not want to even consider taking another step until you convince your ISV's to support Linux.
We've replaced hundreds of SGI's with Linux workstations and seen huge gains in performance and employee output. We started with a single specialized application on about thirty systems, and three years later we're down to our last 20-30 IRIX boxes out of about 1000 systems in house.
I would agree that if all you want to do is run Maya on a single system for a single user with nothing special except what comes out of the box, Windows isn't a bad choice. Running Maya with a complex set of custom plugins and other special integration pieces across a 300+ artist show *does* make Windows a bad choice. And good Linux workstations dramatically outshine IRIX workstations these days. For any scalable environment where you want to have control over your production pipeline, Linux (or some mix) is a popular answer.
As far as the competitive advantage of the workstation configurations at a place like Dreamworks, studios are happy to share their hardware configs with pretty much anyone - it's the customized and highly integrated software and the movies themselves that are the competitive advantage that no one can really discuss.
Dreamworks's current Linux workstation has been advertised in various venues, as Dreamworks has a vendor relationship with HP. It's the same X4000 workstation that was reviewed in Linux Journal, with 2G of memory, two 2.4G P4 Xeon's, 18G and 36G 10K RPM U160 SCSI drives, with an NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL 900 graphics card running RedHat 7.2 and the publicly downloadable NVIDIA drivers. They aren't exactly cheap, but they're still twice as fast as an SGI that costs twice as much.
My views and opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
The "Mira", a VNC-knock-off hardware/software packaged concept, should first start shipping around Christmas time this year. It uses 802.11b wireless, XP Pro, Microsoft's RFB protocol from a Windows CE.Net (4.0) device to let you use your PC from anywhere in your house.
This packaged concept is obviously too difficult for most low-end consumers to assemble themselves, so it makes sense that Microsoft offer a wireless hardware component that they can borg more completely into the whole. Eventually all of the other hardware manufacturers will have to adopt whatever extensions Microsoft introduces in this hardware/software combo in order to offer their customers an equivilently pleasing out of box experience, and Mira gets locked in on the consumer market.
I'm suprised no one mentioned the Mozilla Calendar project's announcement and roadmap this week. This was posted to netscape.public.mozilla.calendar on news.mozilla.org.
Hello everyone!
Well, its been a long time coming, but I think that the calendar is finally at a release that I consider to be relatively stable, and that performs well. The XPI that is available right now fixes many selection problems, reads in Apple's iCal files from http://www.apple.com/ical/library/ and allows users to publish their events back to a webDAV enabled server. I'm calling this release 0.8.
What this means: The 0.8 XPI will remain on the website until we release 0.9. We will continue to make XPIs available as they need to be (daily, weekly, whatever) but they may be more unstable than the 0.8 release.
At the same time, we will work towards putting the calendar into the Mozilla default builds. Build issues are being resolved now, and we should be ready to go soon. I imagine we'll see calendar in Mozilla by their 1.5 release (I hope, and assuming all goes well).
The 0.9 Mozilla calendar release will coincide with turning the calendar on by default in nightly builds.
The 1.0 calendar release will hopefully coicide with the 1.5 release of Mozilla, at which point our numbering system will jump up and match theirs.
Hopefully soon we'll have the target milestones in bugzilla. We will start to prioritize the bugs and see which bugs must be fixed for 0.9 and 1.0, and which ones can wait.
Thanks. The latest XPIs are linked off the website. The 0.8 XPIs are available at: http://www.oeone.com/files/calendar08_linux.x pi http://www.oeone.com/files/calendar08_windows. xpi
Mike
Mike Potter Software Developer, OEone Corp. Mozilla Calendar Project http://www.oeone.com
Not my word. I really don't care for it either. But that's what folks like Jeffrey Katzenberg are calling digitized traditional animation. Considering how Disney basically just shut down traditional animation in the Fantasia hat building in Burbank and Dreamworks Animation is really the only major studio left that does feature-length traditional animation in US, he can call it whatever he wants.
The author clearly doesn't understand the relationship between Dreamworks Animation and Dreamworks/PDI.
Dreamworks Animation has thus far released "tradigital" (digitized traditional) animated movies "Prince of Egypt" and "Road to El Dorado", both of which used IRIX as the focus of their pipelines, and who will be releasing "Sprit: Stallion of the Cimmaron" Memorial Day weekend, which was split between IRIX and Linux. Two key workstation applications were developed for use on Spirit, and rendering mostly stayed on IRIX.
PDI/Dreamworks is a full CG production house which has been in the special effects and commerical spots business for years (Seen those alien Intel ads recently? That was PDI.), and has recently made "ANTZ" and "Shrek". ANTZ was all IRIX, Shrek was split between IRIX and Linux, with IRIX still the most popular on the workstation and Linux was used heavily for rendering.
HP provided lots of assistance with OpenGL workstation compliance on Linux - which undoubtedly contributed to them getting the 3-year deal mentioned in the article. Dreamworks also presently has a support contract with RedHat (as RedHat cited recently in their quarterly report). Dreamworks Animation and PDI/Dreamworks have been requesting Linux versions of various graphics applications and tools since Linux was decided upon several years back.
These statements are my own and not those of my employer.
When you do 3D animation (or digital art of any kind, really...) you don't just have one or two programs that do all the work. You have to constantly come up with new and creative solutions to animation problems.
That's exactly why visual effects houses and animation studios are using Linux. All of these companies have been using IRIX for years and relying on the ease of scripting their production pipelines together from whichever tools happen to work for the job today.
It's not just about a pretty picture on the computer monitor. It's all about generating 129600+ 2K-wide tiff images, and then scripting the conversion of those tiff images to cineon format so they can be printed on a film recorder. UNIX is simply provides the best toolchain for the job.
Re:Don't extrapolate from PDI/Dreamworks
on
Linux and Shrek
·
· Score: 1
On the contrary, DO extrapolate and draw conclusions about the high end graphics world from this. Yes, PDI has very talented R&D staff and have been writing their own gaphics software for 20 years. The fact that they were able to so easily port their 20 years of code to Linux should be a testimony to how corporations can better use Linux.
Also, Dreamworks Animation (Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado) has converted all of their flipbook and ink/paint "traditional" animation systems to Linux already. People with very few computer skills that spend their entire day drawing an animation sequence are then scanning in those animation sequences and conducting basic rough animation tests themselves on Linux. All animation cleanup and painting is also being done on Linux. These are normal, non-technical people using Linux on their desk very effectively. Dreamworks is betting their entire animation pipeline on Linux, and after 6-9 months of usage it appears to be a complete success.
Free Software is larger than a business model; that's why we all call ourselves members of the Free Software Movement or Open Source Movement.
The truth is that people NEED basic social structures to govern them - if a system doesn't work, we need to either fix it or replace it. From this basic truth we have evolved from feudalism to democracy, developed morality and religion, and are now moving towards the ideology that information wants to be free. With the dawn of economical mass information delivery (also known as the Internet), all of the information is out there that you need to conduct your business - it's just a matter of assembling it to your requirements, which is where the cost of ownership comes in and where services are needed.
If you extend this idea by saying that most software is an expression of information to conduct a particular job or fulfill a particular need, then we have now discovered that software generally wants to be free. There are some exceptions, just like we make exceptions with speech (it's free unless you're telling a "secret", however that is defined).
If information wants to be free, then what is worth money in our present economic system? Our time. Thus, service business models make much more sense. It's important to realize that this is a side effect of a greater movement, and not a root cause, however.
So basically the rules that we are being governed by aren't working well with this new era of free information and software, and either need to be replaced or fixed. Society has spoken, and we need new rules for social order. The Free Software Movement is closer in my mind to the Renaissance and Age of Enlightment than a simple business model.
We evaluated Tarantella a while back as an interesting way to make a single, cohesive environment out of a variety of application environments (shell apps, X apps, Windows apps). Then we woke up and realized that it was overhead and that user training was the most critical function necessary - not hiding the applications behind a web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
Use Gstreamer as-installed on your existing system. Put this in a simple bash script and have-at:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="$1" ! decodebin name=decoder { oggmux name=muxer ! filesink location="$2" } { decoder. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! queue ! muxer. } { decoder. ! queue ! audioconvert ! queue ! muxer. }
Add the Fluendo codecs, and you have a properly patent-licensed, legal way to transcode most popular media to no-patent-royalties media types.
Let's be honest here - just because you're installing the "unified driver" doesn't mean you're following the same code path under the hood for your new card vs. your 3-year-old card. It's more like a unified installer with common shared objects statically linked in and specific code for each and every GPU and special card feature. New code is added for new cards, old card-specific code is abandoned in-place. There is very little actual unification where it matters for stability - folks doing enterprise graphics support know that new drivers become unstable for old cards every time there is a major feature release. The reason companies buy a Quadro FX for twice the cost vs. a GeForce is so the manufacturer will actually fix the bugs.
See:
b eros
t ion
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Howto:Ker
Not to sound cantankerous, but there's plenty of reasonable documentation hidden away on the project's Documentation page:
http://directory.fedora.redhat.com/wiki/Documenta
TileFlow is excellent for most conventional datacenters and has served us well. Best practice in a conventional datacenter is to use TileFlow to ensure positive pressure and appropriate distribution (don't forget to model all your underfloor blockages), set up cold rows and hot rows, and then use a drop ceiling as a plenum with strategically located grates to pull the hot air back into your CRAC units. The only problem, as others have pointed out, is that it's only a 2D model presently and you really need to start modelling your load in 3D when you get past around 12kW/rack.
We've speculated that if we were to start all over again we'd skip the raised floor and do a bi-level drop ceiling with one level being cold air distribution to cold rows and the other level being the hot air return. Let cold air fall and warm air rise, and augment it all with XDO's from Liebert.
Absolutely, positively have multiple vendors come in with their graphics workstations and then proceed to evaluate how well your critical applications can run. Expect this process to take months.
Finally, I'm not sure how large and mature your present environment is, but if you're talking about more than a few seats and two or three apps, expect a transition that takes a long time. Let people run their O2's next to their Linux boxes. Eventually, if you give the Linux systems proper care and feeding, you'll see dust start to collect on the O2's. Then, and only then, have you successfully completed your transition.
Agreed. You're biting off more than you can chew. You'd be absolutely insane to throw away your Solaris infrastructure on day one. Quality will sell your ideas, and consistency is the one true measure for quality. Work with your sysadmin staff to make Linux a first-tier quality desktop. Don't go cheap. Let Linux and Solaris compete on equal terms, and it will be easy to pick a winner.
Do you have all of your ISV's lined up? Getting all of the software pulled together that you need to be productive at your job is the hardest part. Are you there? If you're not, you might not want to even consider taking another step until you convince your ISV's to support Linux.
We've replaced hundreds of SGI's with Linux workstations and seen huge gains in performance and employee output. We started with a single specialized application on about thirty systems, and three years later we're down to our last 20-30 IRIX boxes out of about 1000 systems in house.
I would agree that if all you want to do is run Maya on a single system for a single user with nothing special except what comes out of the box, Windows isn't a bad choice. Running Maya with a complex set of custom plugins and other special integration pieces across a 300+ artist show *does* make Windows a bad choice. And good Linux workstations dramatically outshine IRIX workstations these days. For any scalable environment where you want to have control over your production pipeline, Linux (or some mix) is a popular answer.
As far as the competitive advantage of the workstation configurations at a place like Dreamworks, studios are happy to share their hardware configs with pretty much anyone - it's the customized and highly integrated software and the movies themselves that are the competitive advantage that no one can really discuss.
Dreamworks's current Linux workstation has been advertised in various venues, as Dreamworks has a vendor relationship with HP. It's the same X4000 workstation that was reviewed in Linux Journal, with 2G of memory, two 2.4G P4 Xeon's, 18G and 36G 10K RPM U160 SCSI drives, with an NVIDIA Quadro4 XGL 900 graphics card running RedHat 7.2 and the publicly downloadable NVIDIA drivers. They aren't exactly cheap, but they're still twice as fast as an SGI that costs twice as much.
My views and opinions expressed herein are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.
The "Mira", a VNC-knock-off hardware/software packaged concept, should first start shipping around Christmas time this year. It uses 802.11b wireless, XP Pro, Microsoft's RFB protocol from a Windows CE .Net (4.0) device to let you use your PC from anywhere in your house.
This packaged concept is obviously too difficult for most low-end consumers to assemble themselves, so it makes sense that Microsoft offer a wireless hardware component that they can borg more completely into the whole. Eventually all of the other hardware manufacturers will have to adopt whatever extensions Microsoft introduces in this hardware/software combo in order to offer their customers an equivilently pleasing out of box experience, and Mira gets locked in on the consumer market.
January announcement
WinHEC PowerPoint presentation
Not my word. I really don't care for it either. But that's what folks like Jeffrey Katzenberg are calling digitized traditional animation. Considering how Disney basically just shut down traditional animation in the Fantasia hat building in Burbank and Dreamworks Animation is really the only major studio left that does feature-length traditional animation in US, he can call it whatever he wants.
The author clearly doesn't understand the relationship between Dreamworks Animation and Dreamworks/PDI.
Dreamworks Animation has thus far released "tradigital" (digitized traditional) animated movies "Prince of Egypt" and "Road to El Dorado", both of which used IRIX as the focus of their pipelines, and who will be releasing "Sprit: Stallion of the Cimmaron" Memorial Day weekend, which was split between IRIX and Linux. Two key workstation applications were developed for use on Spirit, and rendering mostly stayed on IRIX.
PDI/Dreamworks is a full CG production house which has been in the special effects and commerical spots business for years (Seen those alien Intel ads recently? That was PDI.), and has recently made "ANTZ" and "Shrek". ANTZ was all IRIX, Shrek was split between IRIX and Linux, with IRIX still the most popular on the workstation and Linux was used heavily for rendering.
HP provided lots of assistance with OpenGL workstation compliance on Linux - which undoubtedly contributed to them getting the 3-year deal mentioned in the article. Dreamworks also presently has a support contract with RedHat (as RedHat cited recently in their quarterly report). Dreamworks Animation and PDI/Dreamworks have been requesting Linux versions of various graphics applications and tools since Linux was decided upon several years back.
These statements are my own and not those of my employer.
That's exactly why visual effects houses and animation studios are using Linux. All of these companies have been using IRIX for years and relying on the ease of scripting their production pipelines together from whichever tools happen to work for the job today.
It's not just about a pretty picture on the computer monitor. It's all about generating 129600+ 2K-wide tiff images, and then scripting the conversion of those tiff images to cineon format so they can be printed on a film recorder. UNIX is simply provides the best toolchain for the job.
On the contrary, DO extrapolate and draw conclusions about the high end graphics world from this. Yes, PDI has very talented R&D staff and have been writing their own gaphics software for 20 years. The fact that they were able to so easily port their 20 years of code to Linux should be a testimony to how corporations can better use Linux.
Also, Dreamworks Animation (Prince of Egypt, Road to El Dorado) has converted all of their flipbook and ink/paint "traditional" animation systems to Linux already. People with very few computer skills that spend their entire day drawing an animation sequence are then scanning in those animation sequences and conducting basic rough animation tests themselves on Linux. All animation cleanup and painting is also being done on Linux. These are normal, non-technical people using Linux on their desk very effectively. Dreamworks is betting their entire animation pipeline on Linux, and after 6-9 months of usage it appears to be a complete success.
Free Software is larger than a business model; that's why we all call ourselves members of the Free Software Movement or Open Source Movement.
The truth is that people NEED basic social structures to govern them - if a system doesn't work, we need to either fix it or replace it. From this basic truth we have evolved from feudalism to democracy, developed morality and religion, and are now moving towards the ideology that information wants to be free. With the dawn of economical mass information delivery (also known as the Internet), all of the information is out there that you need to conduct your business - it's just a matter of assembling it to your requirements, which is where the cost of ownership comes in and where services are needed.
If you extend this idea by saying that most software is an expression of information to conduct a particular job or fulfill a particular need, then we have now discovered that software generally wants to be free. There are some exceptions, just like we make exceptions with speech (it's free unless you're telling a "secret", however that is defined).
If information wants to be free, then what is worth money in our present economic system? Our time. Thus, service business models make much more sense. It's important to realize that this is a side effect of a greater movement, and not a root cause, however.
So basically the rules that we are being governed by aren't working well with this new era of free information and software, and either need to be replaced or fixed. Society has spoken, and we need new rules for social order. The Free Software Movement is closer in my mind to the Renaissance and Age of Enlightment than a simple business model.
Greetings!
We evaluated Tarantella a while back as an interesting way to make a single, cohesive environment out of a variety of application environments (shell apps, X apps, Windows apps). Then we woke up and realized that it was overhead and that user training was the most critical function necessary - not hiding the applications behind a web browser.
If you're interested in having business users that don't understand X use a Linux app in a browser, then you'll also be interested in products like GraphOn, Exceed Web, and the X11R6.3 X browser plugin (also known as Broadway or LBX). Sun/Netscape/iPlanet/AOL/Time Warner/Great Satan also has a competitive product they acquired from a startup that if I recall properly gave them the "iPlanet" name. This can be found at http://www.iplanet.com/products/infrastructure/rem ote_access/s_web_entprs/index.html .