Anonymous is uninformed. Digital Domain used a Linux render-farm for Titanic, but as usual at DD, the bulk of the 3D interactive work was done on SGIs (and some Macs, and PCs with NT). This is very typical: renderfarms are whatever the company can get for the lowest cost/rendermark (or equivalent), and they don't use any graphics hardware, just the CPUs. For example, Sun gave Pixar a great deal on a renderfarm... and they still buy OCTANE2s for their interactive work.
It is trivial to check: http://www.d2.com/text/faq/main.html and see what tools they use.
In the last 10 years, consider all of the films that won Academy awards for Computer-Generated special effects, and add in all of those nominated. Of these films, can you name the films that did *not* use SGI?
Finally, to avoid this being an SGI versus LInux, do recall that SGI is seriously investing in LInux work and contributing to the community in this turf, so it's not like we dislike it, just the facts.
To fix a few misconceptions: 1) The bricks are (mostly) 3U [5.25"], or 4U [7"] high, and the same bricks are used to construct a wild range of systems, with huge variations in CPU-I/O-storage ratios. 2) In some cases, the bricks will be sold separately and embedded into airplanes, vans, etc, by defense contractors. I'm told the submarine folks really love the idea. 3) In a half-rack (SGI Origin 3200), you can have 2-8 CPUs [1-2 C-bricks], a required I/O brick [I-brick], and either another I/O brick (I, P, or X) or a disk brick (D-brick). 4) People always announce a wide range of systems: realistically, most of these machines will be 1-2 rack systems, just like they are for everybody else. People who buy lots of computers use racks anyway - the last thing in the world they want to do is waste precious floorspace. 5) IRIX already scales to 512P fairly well, and NASA AMES runs individual shared-memory jobs on their older Origin2000. It already saved you a lot of tax money. 6) SGI is not shipping Linux on the MIPS-based machines. This is a "Caterpillar" announcement, with a lot of shoes left to drop, like IA-64-Linux versions coming later. A major point of the brick thing is that you can change bricks while re-using most of what you already had; you can for example, introduce a PCI-X, or later, Infiniband brick without obsoleting older I/O bricks. Also, you can build C-bricks with Intel IA-64s, and those will run Linux, not IRIX. All of the rest of the hardware infrastructure & bricks are the same. 7) SGI is working hard with the Linux community on scalability, i.e., to let it handle more CPUs well without damaging the basic Linux. Personally, I doubt that it will make sense to try to scale Linux to where Irix is, but it will certainly scale big enough to be interesting [say 32-64P in single system image]. Using partitioned hardware, one can get NUMAlink speeds between partitions, and that satisfies many customers. 8)The customer should be able to pick the size of machine, and then cluster that size together. For some customers, 1P + 64MB is just dandy, and they buy clusters of IA-32 boxes. I know customers where the right size happens to be 32P, 16GB of memory, 2 disks, and 3 Ethernets [one full rack], and then they cluster a lot of those. I know customers that cluster 128Ps, and there's one who would cluster 512Ps if they had the money. If the NASA Ames folks had the money, what they really want is a single machine with Petabytes of memory and Petaflops. I was sorry to tell them, Not Likely Soon. 9) Don't get too crazy with the fact these systems can go really big. I've lost track, but I think there are 30,000 of the Origin2000s & 200s out there, and most systems are small to medium. Of course, the big systems account for many CPUs. 10) The NUMAflex brick approach has many subtle benefits, but is hard work. In some thread, people mentioned backplanes... but there aren't backplanes in the normal sense. Each C-brick has 4 MIPS CPUs, memory, and an ASIC Crossbar, with 2 ports out the back for cables that run (peak) rates of 3.2 GB/sec (2 * 1.6GB) and 2.4 GB/sec for I/O to separate I/O bricks. Each brick has internal circuit boards, but there is nothing that looks like a normal CPU backplane. To do this, you have to be able to run 3meter/5meter cables at these rates, and do tricky circuit engineering. Later versions will independently improve the interconnects as well, not just upgrade the bricks.
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Anonymous is uninformed. Digital Domain used a Linux render-farm for Titanic, but as usual at DD, the bulk of the 3D interactive work was done on SGIs (and some Macs, and PCs with NT). This is very typical: renderfarms are whatever the company can get for the lowest cost/rendermark (or equivalent), and they don't use any graphics hardware, just the CPUs. For example, Sun gave Pixar a great deal on a renderfarm ... and they still buy OCTANE2s for their interactive work.
It is trivial to check:
http://www.d2.com/text/faq/main.html
and see what tools they use.
In the last 10 years, consider all of the films that won Academy awards for Computer-Generated special effects, and add in all of those nominated. Of these films, can you name the films that did *not* use SGI?
Finally, to avoid this being an SGI versus LInux, do recall that SGI is seriously investing in LInux work and contributing to the community in this turf, so it's not like we dislike it, just the facts.
To fix a few misconceptions: 1) The bricks are (mostly) 3U [5.25"], or 4U [7"] high, and the same bricks are used to construct a wild range of systems, with huge variations in CPU-I/O-storage ratios. 2) In some cases, the bricks will be sold separately and embedded into airplanes, vans, etc, by defense contractors. I'm told the submarine folks really love the idea. 3) In a half-rack (SGI Origin 3200), you can have 2-8 CPUs [1-2 C-bricks], a required I/O brick [I-brick], and either another I/O brick (I, P, or X) or a disk brick (D-brick). 4) People always announce a wide range of systems: realistically, most of these machines will be 1-2 rack systems, just like they are for everybody else. People who buy lots of computers use racks anyway - the last thing in the world they want to do is waste precious floorspace. 5) IRIX already scales to 512P fairly well, and NASA AMES runs individual shared-memory jobs on their older Origin2000. It already saved you a lot of tax money. 6) SGI is not shipping Linux on the MIPS-based machines. This is a "Caterpillar" announcement, with a lot of shoes left to drop, like IA-64-Linux versions coming later. A major point of the brick thing is that you can change bricks while re-using most of what you already had; you can for example, introduce a PCI-X, or later, Infiniband brick without obsoleting older I/O bricks. Also, you can build C-bricks with Intel IA-64s, and those will run Linux, not IRIX. All of the rest of the hardware infrastructure & bricks are the same. 7) SGI is working hard with the Linux community on scalability, i.e., to let it handle more CPUs well without damaging the basic Linux. Personally, I doubt that it will make sense to try to scale Linux to where Irix is, but it will certainly scale big enough to be interesting [say 32-64P in single system image]. Using partitioned hardware, one can get NUMAlink speeds between partitions, and that satisfies many customers. 8)The customer should be able to pick the size of machine, and then cluster that size together. For some customers, 1P + 64MB is just dandy, and they buy clusters of IA-32 boxes. I know customers where the right size happens to be 32P, 16GB of memory, 2 disks, and 3 Ethernets [one full rack], and then they cluster a lot of those. I know customers that cluster 128Ps, and there's one who would cluster 512Ps if they had the money. If the NASA Ames folks had the money, what they really want is a single machine with Petabytes of memory and Petaflops. I was sorry to tell them, Not Likely Soon. 9) Don't get too crazy with the fact these systems can go really big. I've lost track, but I think there are 30,000 of the Origin2000s & 200s out there, and most systems are small to medium. Of course, the big systems account for many CPUs. 10) The NUMAflex brick approach has many subtle benefits, but is hard work. In some thread, people mentioned backplanes ... but there aren't backplanes in the normal sense. Each C-brick has 4 MIPS CPUs, memory, and an ASIC Crossbar, with 2 ports out the back for cables that run (peak) rates of 3.2 GB/sec (2 * 1.6GB) and 2.4 GB/sec for I/O to separate I/O bricks. Each brick has internal circuit boards, but there is nothing that looks like a normal CPU backplane. To do this, you have to be able to run 3meter/5meter cables at these rates, and do tricky circuit engineering. Later versions will independently improve the interconnects as well, not just upgrade the bricks.