What I am talking about is the compositing software.
Shake and Rayz were the leading up and coming software for all platforms for CG studios. They had support for many platforms and were doing well.
Apple has purchased both and stated that they can not promise support or continuation of development for this software for any platform other than the Mac.
So, if I need to buy some composotie software and I need it to have some of the cutting edge features, I will be forced into using a Mac. That is what I don't appreciate. I want to move to a platform because it is the best, not because they have made the best business deals.
I truly do like Apple and the machines, about once a month I go to the local computer stores and drool over the ibooks and g4 towers. Someday I will own one. But I want this to be on my own time.
-Tim
Re:Apple on a buying streak
on
Apple Buys Emagic
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
True. But I don't want a Windows or a Mac solution.
I am happy with my Linux farm. With an investment of 500 machines, I don't want to have to change because software had been rendered useless due to some marketing strategy.
From what I understand from others in the movie industry, the studios are looking at packages for a feature, not packages for long term use. I think all of this stems from the way software vendors create a product, rest on their laurels, and then get replaced by somebody else.
Being in a smaller shop, I don't know if we can play that game. We are trying to finish a 3d movie using composer as our compositing software and it is a major bottle neck. Composer is good, don't get me wrong, but the software runs on older, slower SGI boxes. Shake and Rayz are what we are looking at in the future, but neither may be arround for Linux in 2 years.
-Tim
Apple on a buying streak
on
Apple Buys Emagic
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Apple has purchased 2 companies with compositing software and now a company with audio software.
Where are they getting all this money???
And from what I understand, in all cases they are looking at discontinuing Windows support and posibly Linux as well.
I am all for Apple having strong authoring tools, but to buy out software that people rely on to do work and then drop support for their platform is pretty shadey. It is forcing us to move to a Mac or to find some other software, and in some cases, all the other software is a few generations behind.
I may not mind getting a Mac, but please don't force me into it.
Rushes... we do those... (its nice to see when your studio isn't completely out in left field)
But when done, the system takes over the GL display and the frame sections are copied off of the GL buffer on to disk... at least in Maya... if I remember correctly.
For the most part, we will do those for animation checks, but every night the animator will still have a flip rendered of their work at that stage. The nice thing about only doing one movie at a time is that all the renderboxes are dedicated to what stage of production you are in, so the artists can get actual renders back instead of hardware approximations.
Also due to the way we do mouths, we need flips to see mouth animation on the veggie characters.
Sure sure... hardware rendering... When a gpu can handle 20+ million polly's with 4k textures on them... and 600+ MB scene files. And 2gb of system ram.
If you look at what a cpu based render has to handle and all the files it has to generate, it would have to be an extremely specialized machine that would cost an extreme amount of money. I would rather throw my money at more dual 2.2 Ghz P4 rackmounts.
They prove they work. And they are standard hardware. So anybody that makes software will support them.
It is all pretty much a pipe dream to get realtime renders at the quality needed for film. As soon as that happens, I am out of a job. The amazing thing about CG Studios is that they keep raising the bar as hardware comes out... so the faster the machines the heavier the scene is.
Its not that artists are getting much better as much as machines are able to handle more.
I wouldn't fear for A|W too much. Everybody in the industry uses it. We would not be able to function with out it. Being in a medium sized studio, we need to have some solutions come pre-packaged and others to be built in-house.
I do worry for SGI though. They are loosing (or maybe lost) the high end desk top war. People are picking up dual Xeons and even after PC manufacturer's suport contracts, it is cheaper than a stand alone SGI that runs at half the speed.
We have been migrating to linux for the last two years, first as a render solution and then as a desktop solution. When we get a linux compositing tool in house, we will be completely free of SGI systems for production work.
I know that Maya has a pretty complex modeler and it has solvers that allow for all sorts of stuff. You can do IK solvers for a body and you can also add influences to states, such as gravity and wind.
I created a simple marble toy using the system. It would drop a marble and launch another one off of a see-saw and then start rolling down a track.
If she really wanted realism, she should look into motion capture, as other have suggested. It doesn't really take that complicated of mocap setup. Just patience and time at the end to tweak the animation keys.
I know that people have been doing 2D animation in flash for a while now... we even have a new video series that uses it. ( Larry Boy )
I imagine you could throw something together using perltk and perl::flash to create flash movies. I haven't played with the perl::flash stuff, but I imagine it isn't too steep of learning curve.
-Tim
I am suprised at the number of "non-industry" people that are complaining about the CG.
I am in the industry.. specificly pure CG, not mixed with live action, so I am used to seeing smooth animation, perfect compositing and what not. I normally pick up on the technical problems with a movies CG.
With Spider-Man... my brain filtered it all out. I enjoyed the movie so much that I did not notice the technical problems. It has been a while since the last time I could say that. And that goes for co-workers of mine as well. Each of them with different backgrounds from CG studios. Not a complaint about the CG at all.
Maybe its because we know how hard it is that we filter out the tough mistakes. But I think it was the pace and quality of the movie that kept us in and kept us from noticing the glitches.
If we had shake in house instead of composer, we would have a studio of 50+ linux desktops and 250+ linux render boxes. We have a few macs for photoshop and an NT box for 3D painting. We would have two Avids for editing. We would have some Suns for file serving.
No SGIs would be needed.
Infact, that is our current setup, minus the SGIS we keep to do our composites. And we are producing a 3D feature film. Even our DDR is a linux system.
We could get rid of our Macs for photoshop and use gimp for almost all of the digital painting that is being done. Gimp is almost there. It is not laughed at by the pros. We use it all the time for paint fixes and other quick solutions.
There are still a few, small niche markets for non Linux boxes in the studio. They do have an important roll. But when comparing the amount of systems and the price, they don't compare to the amount that is invested into a Linux solution.
I was nervous with Apples purcahse of Shake. Between that and Maya being ported to OS X, I was afraid that in the near future, our render farm would have to consist of some really nice desktops, but extremely expensive render boxes. We currently have 250+ dedicated render machines. They are all dual proc 800 MHZ to 1.8 GHZ and they are running linux. This is a hefty investment. But to get the same power out of a Mac farm would cost us dearly.
We have looked at Shake. We will probably move to it for our next project. Using Composer right now is slowing us down. We have started end of life our octanes in favor for Linux desktops, but we have to keep them arround because our process relies heavily on Composer with Tinderbox to do depth of field and A over B composites. It is a slow and painful process, but at this time it is cheaper and cost less development time than Shake would.
I am still a little nervous I guess. At the core of the software for Shake, I don't imagine that it would take much work for Apple to continue the Linux port. I can see why they would want to edge out the SGI version in the near future. I have a feeling that the places that don't switch from IRIX to Linux in the next few years will have switched to OS X instead.
Another concern of mine is the state of Alias|Wavefront. They are a good company. Unfortunately, them being owned by SGI causes concern because I do not see a pretty future for that company. There machines are being replaced in several industries. Its true that they have some heavy hitters that are dedicated to them in the data visualization and high end server areas, but I feel that even these places will look at the cost savings of a Linux solution, they will port over and they will not look back.
It makes this an exciting yet delicate time in the animation industry. Being tied to a platform is a necesity because of the investment but it can also seem like a potential downfall of a studio. Heading on the wrong platform at the wrong time can cost you more time and money than you can afford.
Would this new scheduler help me?
I have a larger linux render farm and the machines are almost always at a +90% cpu utilization. The renderer is one master process and two children processes. All the systems are dual proc. The processes can and will run the system short on memory (1 or 2 GB systems) and sometimes it will hit swap, but this we try hard to avoid.
Will this new scheduler help such a system. I don't have a ton of processes to run, just a few hefty ones.
The news article says last updated at 2:05 PM, this was posted at 2:54 PM.
This/. story is obviously incorrect now... at 3:00 EST... So does this mean that it was a goof on Yahoo's part? Does that mean that/. needs to appologize for criticizing Yahoo for selling out?
I would just love to know what all is going on with this... a mistake (or two) were made.The mistake could have been somebody not checking up on the story before posting it, the webmaster on yahoo making a mistake, or us for believing it that Yahoo is above this and that they covered their tracks when they were caught.
Many CG studios have gone through some rounds of lay offs the last year.
And Shrek was not that good of movie. The script was so-so and the character movemnt was only believable on the donkey... and sometimes Shrek. Monsters, Inc on the otherhand did an excellent job. Pixar does a good job of making things look right.
Also.. another studio making a feature length CG movie is Big Idea doing an adaptation of Jonah. (Got to throw a plug in somewhere;)
I have done similar tests comparing SGI Linux boxes, HP Linux boxes, Octanes, Octane2s and my home built Linux box.
All tests were done under Maya 3.0 doing animation scrubbing on some average scenes.
The conclusion I came to was that the Octane2 was far faster than the Octane. This was a no brainer. The Octane 2 was a much needed improvement to both graphics speed and MHZ for the SGI line. The suprise was that the Intel based linux boxes were faster than the Octane 2.
This was accounted for by the raw MHZ needed by todays graphics workstations. The graphics card was being under utalized because the CPU couldn't push polys to the card fast enough. This was not because of bus speed but because of the way the software is setup.
Most animators want special controls over what they are animating. They almost never move a CV at a time, unless tweaking something. All of the CV positions are determined by a series of nodes of input. Each node needs to be computed. This takes lots and lots of MHZ.
Because the tests show that the "work" speed of a system is locked into MHZ, it is easy to tell where to put your money when buying a system. A home built system can compare to a highend graphics system when it comes to CPU power. There will be cases where a better graphics card will make some difference.
Also, not all animation software uses the second processor. Some will use it for rendering but not for the front end. If you plan on animating on the machine and rendering else where, you can again save some money. I prefer the second CPU because I have the habit of leaving Xemacs and Mozilla open when I am using Maya. A second CPU is a must for a render farm.
If the modeling interface was pure OpenGL, I would agree with you.
Unfortunately most animators work with complex riggings that ease the job they have to do but adds to the work of the CPU. I would say in most cases, the 3D card is not what is slowing down an animator. It is the processor.
Using Maya as an example, the node system that they use needs a hefty CPU to go in and determine just where all the CVs are. This can cut the frame rate down to under a frame a second if the geometry is to high. If you aren't scrubbing the animation though, the frame rate will go through the roof. Try taking a scene with some complex geometry in some nasty deformation latices. Scrub. Now take the view port and spin arround. You will notice a major difference between the two.
MHZ will always be needed for highend graphics tools. There is always a trade off done by the animator between geometry seen and realtime animation.
I have been using Maya for Linux for a while now. Last year A|W had Maya 2.5's renderer ported to Linux. This year they released 3.0 on NT,IRIX and Linux. Soon (or maybe it has happened...) 4.0 will be released for Linux, it is currently out for NT and IRIX.
The speed is there on Linux, most studios are looking at moving from IRIX in the future, or they have moved. We are looking at moving from IRIX in the near future.
Most larger production studios have in house tools as well as Maya and other pieces of software, so A|W's port is only one part of the solution.
chkconfig works well with xinetd.
I also like the individual config files for each service. Lets me copy a config for a file from a working machine to a new machine and not worry about clobbering any of the other (x)inetd services.
Something we did in football... line the long snapper up all alone... and all the other people further down the line. This caused the team to respect the move and move there line down as well... or else we had an 8 man screen.
Following this idea... if we have songs that seem to be copyrighted... match name, and size... and they do any form of attack to our system, wouldn't they be liable?
They would have to respect this possibility and react to it... or else they would get some potentialy large lawsuits.
I find too that people assume that an "X" type of cluster will solve all problems, regardless of what they are. Each cluster type serves a purpose. Cray and then SGI spent time developing the Cray Link for a reason. Sun, IBM, HP and others have gotten into the game as well. Sometimes you need a ton of procs with access to the same memory, sometimes the task divides well.
I see this from almost the opposite side of the spectrum with rendering. To render a shot, you can divide the task amongst ignorant machines. They just need to know what they are working on. The cleverness goes into the managment of these machines. A place where the massively parallel machines would be nice is rendering a single frame. After the renderers initial load of the scene file and preping for render, the task can be divided amongst many processors on the same machine. To divide it beowulf style would throttle the network with the memory sharing over the ethernet ports.
So from my experience:
big data, long time... massivley parallel machinebig data, short time... generic cluster with smart master
little data, long time... beowulf style cluster
little data, short time... generic cluster with smart master
Software such as Platform's LSF take care of this magicly... it even allows for checkpointing, assuming your task allows it.
Because my render software didn't really do checkpointing, I had to add that in to my wrapper code.
We do use desktops at night to work with our render farm. Platform has some cool tools to work with for such environments. I have never tried LSF in conjunction with PVM or MPI but they have support for it, so I imagine it does pretty well.
Slashdot Mirror
What I am talking about is the compositing software.
Shake and Rayz were the leading up and coming software for all platforms for CG studios. They had support for many platforms and were doing well.
Apple has purchased both and stated that they can not promise support or continuation of development for this software for any platform other than the Mac.
So, if I need to buy some composotie software and I need it to have some of the cutting edge features, I will be forced into using a Mac. That is what I don't appreciate. I want to move to a platform because it is the best, not because they have made the best business deals.
I truly do like Apple and the machines, about once a month I go to the local computer stores and drool over the ibooks and g4 towers. Someday I will own one. But I want this to be on my own time.
-Tim
True.
But I don't want a Windows or a Mac solution.
I am happy with my Linux farm. With an investment of 500 machines, I don't want to have to change because software had been rendered useless due to some marketing strategy.
From what I understand from others in the movie industry, the studios are looking at packages for a feature, not packages for long term use. I think all of this stems from the way software vendors create a product, rest on their laurels, and then get replaced by somebody else.
Being in a smaller shop, I don't know if we can play that game. We are trying to finish a 3d movie using composer as our compositing software and it is a major bottle neck. Composer is good, don't get me wrong, but the software runs on older, slower SGI boxes. Shake and Rayz are what we are looking at in the future, but neither may be arround for Linux in 2 years.
-Tim
Apple has purchased 2 companies with compositing software and now a company with audio software.
Where are they getting all this money???
And from what I understand, in all cases they are looking at discontinuing Windows support and posibly Linux as well.
I am all for Apple having strong authoring tools, but to buy out software that people rely on to do work and then drop support for their platform is pretty shadey. It is forcing us to move to a Mac or to find some other software, and in some cases, all the other software is a few generations behind.
I may not mind getting a Mac, but please don't force me into it.
-Tim
Rushes... we do those... (its nice to see when your studio isn't completely out in left field)
But when done, the system takes over the GL display and the frame sections are copied off of the GL buffer on to disk... at least in Maya... if I remember correctly.
For the most part, we will do those for animation checks, but every night the animator will still have a flip rendered of their work at that stage. The nice thing about only doing one movie at a time is that all the renderboxes are dedicated to what stage of production you are in, so the artists can get actual renders back instead of hardware approximations.
Also due to the way we do mouths, we need flips to see mouth animation on the veggie characters.
-Tim
Sure sure... hardware rendering...
When a gpu can handle 20+ million polly's with 4k textures on them... and 600+ MB scene files.
And 2gb of system ram.
If you look at what a cpu based render has to handle and all the files it has to generate, it would have to be an extremely specialized machine that would cost an extreme amount of money. I would rather throw my money at more dual 2.2 Ghz P4 rackmounts.
They prove they work. And they are standard hardware. So anybody that makes software will support them.
It is all pretty much a pipe dream to get realtime renders at the quality needed for film. As soon as that happens, I am out of a job. The amazing thing about CG Studios is that they keep raising the bar as hardware comes out... so the faster the machines the heavier the scene is.
Its not that artists are getting much better as much as machines are able to handle more.
-Tim
I wouldn't fear for A|W too much.
Everybody in the industry uses it. We would not be able to function with out it. Being in a medium sized studio, we need to have some solutions come pre-packaged and others to be built in-house.
I do worry for SGI though. They are loosing (or maybe lost) the high end desk top war. People are picking up dual Xeons and even after PC manufacturer's suport contracts, it is cheaper than a stand alone SGI that runs at half the speed.
We have been migrating to linux for the last two years, first as a render solution and then as a desktop solution. When we get a linux compositing tool in house, we will be completely free of SGI systems for production work.
-Tim
What software is she using?
I know that Maya has a pretty complex modeler and it has solvers that allow for all sorts of stuff.
You can do IK solvers for a body and you can also add influences to states, such as gravity and wind.
I created a simple marble toy using the system. It would drop a marble and launch another one off of a see-saw and then start rolling down a track.
If she really wanted realism, she should look into motion capture, as other have suggested. It doesn't really take that complicated of mocap setup. Just patience and time at the end to tweak the animation keys.
-Tim
I know that people have been doing 2D animation in flash for a while now... we even have a new video series that uses it. ( Larry Boy ) I imagine you could throw something together using perltk and perl::flash to create flash movies. I haven't played with the perl::flash stuff, but I imagine it isn't too steep of learning curve. -Tim
I am suprised at the number of "non-industry" people that are complaining about the CG.
... my brain filtered it all out. I enjoyed the movie so much that I did not notice the technical problems. It has been a while since the last time I could say that. And that goes for co-workers of mine as well. Each of them with different backgrounds from CG studios. Not a complaint about the CG at all.
I am in the industry.. specificly pure CG, not mixed with live action, so I am used to seeing smooth animation, perfect compositing and what not. I normally pick up on the technical problems with a movies CG.
With Spider-Man
Maybe its because we know how hard it is that we filter out the tough mistakes. But I think it was the pace and quality of the movie that kept us in and kept us from noticing the glitches.
-Tim
I disagree.
If we had shake in house instead of composer, we would have a studio of 50+ linux desktops and 250+ linux render boxes.
We have a few macs for photoshop and an NT box for 3D painting. We would have two Avids for editing. We would have some Suns for file serving.
No SGIs would be needed.
Infact, that is our current setup, minus the SGIS we keep to do our composites. And we are producing a 3D feature film. Even our DDR is a linux system.
We could get rid of our Macs for photoshop and use gimp for almost all of the digital painting that is being done. Gimp is almost there. It is not laughed at by the pros. We use it all the time for paint fixes and other quick solutions.
There are still a few, small niche markets for non Linux boxes in the studio. They do have an important roll. But when comparing the amount of systems and the price, they don't compare to the amount that is invested into a Linux solution.
-Tim
I was nervous with Apples purcahse of Shake. Between that and Maya being ported to OS X, I was afraid that in the near future, our render farm would have to consist of some really nice desktops, but extremely expensive render boxes.
We currently have 250+ dedicated render machines. They are all dual proc 800 MHZ to 1.8 GHZ and they are running linux. This is a hefty investment. But to get the same power out of a Mac farm would cost us dearly.
We have looked at Shake. We will probably move to it for our next project. Using Composer right now is slowing us down. We have started end of life our octanes in favor for Linux desktops, but we have to keep them arround because our process relies heavily on Composer with Tinderbox to do depth of field and A over B composites. It is a slow and painful process, but at this time it is cheaper and cost less development time than Shake would.
I am still a little nervous I guess. At the core of the software for Shake, I don't imagine that it would take much work for Apple to continue the Linux port. I can see why they would want to edge out the SGI version in the near future. I have a feeling that the places that don't switch from IRIX to Linux in the next few years will have switched to OS X instead.
Another concern of mine is the state of Alias|Wavefront. They are a good company. Unfortunately, them being owned by SGI causes concern because I do not see a pretty future for that company. There machines are being replaced in several industries. Its true that they have some heavy hitters that are dedicated to them in the data visualization and high end server areas, but I feel that even these places will look at the cost savings of a Linux solution, they will port over and they will not look back.
It makes this an exciting yet delicate time in the animation industry. Being tied to a platform is a necesity because of the investment but it can also seem like a potential downfall of a studio. Heading on the wrong platform at the wrong time can cost you more time and money than you can afford.
-Tim
Ah... Thanks... I see it now. I completely missed the small italic font they like to use for the department...
-Tim
Perhaps its late....
But I don't see the S&G reference????
-Tim
Would this new scheduler help me?
I have a larger linux render farm and the machines are almost always at a +90% cpu utilization. The renderer is one master process and two children processes. All the systems are dual proc. The processes can and will run the system short on memory (1 or 2 GB systems) and sometimes it will hit swap, but this we try hard to avoid.
Will this new scheduler help such a system. I don't have a ton of processes to run, just a few hefty ones.
-tim
The news article says last updated at 2:05 PM, this was posted at 2:54 PM. /. story is obviously incorrect now... at 3:00 EST... So does this mean that it was a goof on Yahoo's part? Does that mean that /. needs to appologize for criticizing Yahoo for selling out?
This
I would just love to know what all is going on with this... a mistake (or two) were made.The mistake could have been somebody not checking up on the story before posting it, the webmaster on yahoo making a mistake, or us for believing it that Yahoo is above this and that they covered their tracks when they were caught.
Many CG studios have gone through some rounds of lay offs the last year. .. another studio making a feature length CG movie is Big Idea doing an adaptation of Jonah. (Got to throw a plug in somewhere ;)
And Shrek was not that good of movie. The script was so-so and the character movemnt was only believable on the donkey... and sometimes Shrek.
Monsters, Inc on the otherhand did an excellent job. Pixar does a good job of making things look right.
Also
I have done similar tests comparing SGI Linux boxes, HP Linux boxes, Octanes, Octane2s and my home built Linux box.
All tests were done under Maya 3.0 doing animation scrubbing on some average scenes.
The conclusion I came to was that the Octane2 was far faster than the Octane. This was a no brainer. The Octane 2 was a much needed improvement to both graphics speed and MHZ for the SGI line. The suprise was that the Intel based linux boxes were faster than the Octane 2.
This was accounted for by the raw MHZ needed by todays graphics workstations. The graphics card was being under utalized because the CPU couldn't push polys to the card fast enough. This was not because of bus speed but because of the way the software is setup.
Most animators want special controls over what they are animating. They almost never move a CV at a time, unless tweaking something. All of the CV positions are determined by a series of nodes of input. Each node needs to be computed. This takes lots and lots of MHZ.
Because the tests show that the "work" speed of a system is locked into MHZ, it is easy to tell where to put your money when buying a system. A home built system can compare to a highend graphics system when it comes to CPU power. There will be cases where a better graphics card will make some difference.
Also, not all animation software uses the second processor. Some will use it for rendering but not for the front end. If you plan on animating on the machine and rendering else where, you can again save some money. I prefer the second CPU because I have the habit of leaving Xemacs and Mozilla open when I am using Maya. A second CPU is a must for a render farm.
If the modeling interface was pure OpenGL, I would agree with you.
Unfortunately most animators work with complex riggings that ease the job they have to do but adds to the work of the CPU. I would say in most cases, the 3D card is not what is slowing down an animator. It is the processor.
Using Maya as an example, the node system that they use needs a hefty CPU to go in and determine just where all the CVs are. This can cut the frame rate down to under a frame a second if the geometry is to high. If you aren't scrubbing the animation though, the frame rate will go through the roof. Try taking a scene with some complex geometry in some nasty deformation latices. Scrub. Now take the view port and spin arround. You will notice a major difference between the two.
MHZ will always be needed for highend graphics tools. There is always a trade off done by the animator between geometry seen and realtime animation.
I have been using Maya for Linux for a while now. Last year A|W had Maya 2.5's renderer ported to Linux. This year they released 3.0 on NT,IRIX and Linux. Soon (or maybe it has happened...) 4.0 will be released for Linux, it is currently out for NT and IRIX.
The speed is there on Linux, most studios are looking at moving from IRIX in the future, or they have moved. We are looking at moving from IRIX in the near future.
Most larger production studios have in house tools as well as Maya and other pieces of software, so A|W's port is only one part of the solution.
Little known fact is the "Start" button was going to say "End of the World".
They had to change it to fit with the song.
Nescape 4.x works under IRIX.
Mozilla does not.
Should I be waiting for the IRIX port of IE?
They must really hate mozilla.
chkconfig works well with xinetd.
I also like the individual config files for each service. Lets me copy a config for a file from a working machine to a new machine and not worry about clobbering any of the other (x)inetd services.
Something we did in football... line the long snapper up all alone... and all the other people further down the line. This caused the team to respect the move and move there line down as well... or else we had an 8 man screen.
... match name, and size... and they do any form of attack to our system, wouldn't they be liable?
Following this idea... if we have songs that seem to be copyrighted
They would have to respect this possibility and react to it... or else they would get some potentialy large lawsuits.
Just an idea....
Ahh... Somebody else who gets it...
... massivley parallel machinebig data, short time ... generic cluster with smart master
... beowulf style cluster
... generic cluster with smart master
I find too that people assume that an "X" type of cluster will solve all problems, regardless of what they are. Each cluster type serves a purpose. Cray and then SGI spent time developing the Cray Link for a reason. Sun, IBM, HP and others have gotten into the game as well. Sometimes you need a ton of procs with access to the same memory, sometimes the task divides well.
I see this from almost the opposite side of the spectrum with rendering. To render a shot, you can divide the task amongst ignorant machines. They just need to know what they are working on. The cleverness goes into the managment of these machines. A place where the massively parallel machines would be nice is rendering a single frame. After the renderers initial load of the scene file and preping for render, the task can be divided amongst many processors on the same machine. To divide it beowulf style would throttle the network with the memory sharing over the ethernet ports.
So from my experience:
big data, long time
little data, long time
little data, short time
Software such as Platform's LSF take care of this magicly... it even allows for checkpointing, assuming your task allows it. Because my render software didn't really do checkpointing, I had to add that in to my wrapper code.
We do use desktops at night to work with our render farm. Platform has some cool tools to work with for such environments. I have never tried LSF in conjunction with PVM or MPI but they have support for it, so I imagine it does pretty well.