AFAIK, Alias|Wavefront has only officially announced an IA32 Linux port of the Maya rendering software. I've only heard rumors of them porting the rest. I'd be a very happy camper if they ported the entire Maya package to Linux IA32, IA64, Alpha and PPC.
In a network of Un*x workstations, applications can be installed once by a knowledgeable sysadmin and shared using NFS. Another option is to install on a master machine and mirror it periodically using rdist, rsync, etc. Or just run the program at the server and display the interface locally with the X Window System.
Remember, the network is the computer!
Of course this advice may not apply to standalone machines administered by newbies.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The Intel Celeron may have 1/4th the cache but it is on the same chip as the CPU core and clocked at the same speed. A 500MHz Celeron has 128KB of L2 cache clocked at 500MHz while a 500MHz Pentium III has 512KB of cache clocked at 250MHz. Also the Celeron is cheaper because it is one chip, while the Pentium III consists of the CPU, external L2 cache and a circuit board that plugs into Slot 1.
Does anyone have performance numbers for a dual PIII 500MHz vs. a dual Celeron 500MHz?
I know I can't wait for Coppermine - PIII core (w/ KNI) with 256KB on chip, full speed L2 cache, clocked at >= 600MHz and 133MHz FSB. I hope it uses the Socket 370 package. Anyone in the know care to comment? Will the Abit BP6 support it?
David Tristram, the author of ElectroPaint and one of the Raster Masters, has a web page for his company, Tristram Visual. Perhaps you can beg him to release the source?
I assume you're referring to the SGI Visual Workstation 320 which is priced from $3,399 US. That price includes an Intel Pentium III 450MHz, SGI's Cobalt graphics system, video i/o, audio i/o, Firewire (not supported by NT4, blame M$) and a very high bandwidth memory and i/o system. Their innovative chipset drops a lot of cruft from the legacy PC - no ISA, no BIOS (they use an ARCS PROM instead. You could boot over the network if NT allowed it).
The only way you can beat that system for 3D graphics performance is to spend $2000+ on a high-end graphics card such as the Intergraph Wildcard 4105. Of course you still have to buy a well configured PC to stick that card in. As far as 2D graphics goes the SGI VW 320/540 is unbeatable. Check out the review at Lumis3D.
If you're not doing highend 2D/3D graphics then don't buy the SGI VW320.
Admittedly, if you needed to do graphics work on the 320 today, you'd have to run WinNT, but it looks like SGI is committed to making Linux do 3D graphics well, in the very near future. There's gonna be some serious Linux goings on at SI99RAPH
The $800 US Phobos G160 Fast Ethernet boards attach to the Indigo2's proprietary GIO64 bus which has much higher bandwidth than the EISA bus.
Unfortunately, this card wasn't much faster than the built-in 10BaseT Ethernet with the drivers available for IRIX 6.2. A very depressing realization considering that the card costs more than eight times that of a PC 10/100BaseT card. I just started upgrading to IRIX 6.5.4 and it looks like performance has improved quite a bit.
MAny apps such as softimage and what not allow beowulf style rendering. This of course, is depending if the apps get ported.
mental ray, the renderer that most Softimage shops use, is already ported to Linux (x86 and Alpha) as well as many other flavors of Un*x. It lets a master machine farm out tiles to worker machines and it is multithreaded (takes advantage of SMP) as well.
mental ray is already available for Linux
on
SGIs Linux Future
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· Score: 2
I just wanted to emphasize that mental ray has been available on Linux x86 and Alpha for at least a couple of years now.
I just hope that the various 3D modeling and animation packages are ported to Linux as well. The Sidefx Houdini port is a great first step, but I'm hoping that Alias|Wavefront Maya and Softimage|3D are not far behind.
The Monorail was beautiful, albeit underpowered. Black, anodized aluminum case. Pretty cool as far as computers go.
Sure it had its problems:
Nasty dual-scan LCD monitor
underpowered processor
One ISA slot for optional Ethernet
I think they should try the market out again given that active-matrix LCDs are so much cheaper, and they could probably use one of the many off the shelf NLX mainboards, and still have room for 2 PCI slots. They wouldn't have to waste a slot since Ethernet would be on the mainboard.
I found a total of 7 Linux jobs posted on the SGI - Opportunities page, 6 in engineering and 1 in marketing. req # | date posted| title ------+------------+---------------------------- -------- 35470 | 03/19/1999 | Linux Kernel Development Eng 35726 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer 35727 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer 35730 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer 35731 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer 35742 | 03/05/1999 | Systems Eng-Linux OS Dev 36186 | 04/30/1999 | Dekstop [sic] Linux Product Manager ------+------------+---------------------------- --------
Here's an excerpt of the Responsibilities section of the marketing job (36186):
Knowledge of software development, scientific research, EDA/ECAD a plus.
Judging from their current line of servers, these machines might not have graphics boards in them at all.
The servers will have graphics (probably not accelerated 3D) since they will be designed to run both Linux and Micro$oft Windoze NT. A headless server would be a more reasonable option if NT wasn't part of the plan.
I skimmed this article at a local news stand. It claimed [very much paraphrased, consume with a Tbsp of salt] that Linux couldn't be considered an enterprise quality OS because:
it's thread system doesn't scale well for lots of I/O due to problems with the select() system call. The problem being that all threads are informed when an I/O event happens rather than a select few.
it didn't implement sendfile() efficiently. So it's networking does unnecessary copies.
IMHO, this article was lame because its conclusions were drawn without any benchmark evidence. Just because certain aspects of the Linux kernel aren't as elegant and buzzword compliant as they could be doesn't mean it doesn't kick ass in real production use.
here's the uptime for my Linux mailserver which supports six offices: 12:08am up 193 days, 16:28, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
the only reason its not longer is it wasn't connected to a UPS. The only time I had to reboot before that was when my company changed ISPs.
I skimmed this article at a local news stand. It claimed [very much paraphrased, consume with a Tbsp of salt] that Linux couldn't be considered an enterprise quality OS because:
it's thread system doesn't scale well for lots of I/O due to problems with the select() system call. The problem being that all threads are informed when an I/O event happens rather than a select few.
it didn't implement sendfile() efficiently. So it's networking does unnecessary copies.
IMHO, this article was lame because its conclusions were drawn without any benchmark evidence. Just because certain aspects of the Linux kernel aren't as elegant and buzzword compliant as they could be doesn't mean it does kick ass in real production use. here's my Linux mailserver's uptime: 12:08am up 193 days, 16:28, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
the only reason its not longer is it wasn't connected to a UPS. The only time I had to reboot before that was when my company changed ISPs.
Slashdot Mirror
where did you read the announcement?
AFAIK, Alias|Wavefront has only officially announced an IA32 Linux port of the Maya rendering software. I've only heard rumors of them porting the rest. I'd be a very happy camper if they ported the entire Maya package to Linux IA32, IA64, Alpha and PPC.
Anyone remember the Novell Netware screensaver? It graphically indicated system usage at a glance. Someone should write a similar one for Un*x boxen.
The requirements would be:
Why should users be installing software?
In a network of Un*x workstations, applications can be installed once by a knowledgeable sysadmin and shared using NFS. Another option is to install on a master machine and mirror it periodically using rdist, rsync, etc. Or just run the program at the server and display the interface locally with the X Window System.
Remember, the network is the computer!
Of course this advice may not apply to standalone machines administered by newbies.
Sounds like a great topic for a Slashdot poll. That would be a yea vote for me ...
I'd love to check out the innards of that program. Also, it was written for the old IrisGL libraries so it's past due for a port to OpenGL.
BTW, electropaint was written by David Tristram
Have you ever run ep with the -c option? Try it, you'll like it.
You're comparing apples to oranges. The Intel Celeron may have 1/4th the cache but it is on the same chip as the CPU core and clocked at the same speed. A 500MHz Celeron has 128KB of L2 cache clocked at 500MHz while a 500MHz Pentium III has 512KB of cache clocked at 250MHz. Also the Celeron is cheaper because it is one chip, while the Pentium III consists of the CPU, external L2 cache and a circuit board that plugs into Slot 1.
Does anyone have performance numbers for a dual PIII 500MHz vs. a dual Celeron 500MHz?
I know I can't wait for Coppermine - PIII core (w/ KNI) with 256KB on chip, full speed L2 cache, clocked at >= 600MHz and 133MHz FSB. I hope it uses the Socket 370 package. Anyone in the know care to comment? Will the Abit BP6 support it?
David Tristram, the author of ElectroPaint and one of the Raster Masters, has a web page for his company, Tristram Visual . Perhaps you can beg him to release the source?
The only way you can beat that system for 3D graphics performance is to spend $2000+ on a high-end graphics card such as the Intergraph Wildcard 4105. Of course you still have to buy a well configured PC to stick that card in. As far as 2D graphics goes the SGI VW 320/540 is unbeatable. Check out the review at Lumis3D.
If you're not doing highend 2D/3D graphics then don't buy the SGI VW320.
Admittedly, if you needed to do graphics work on the 320 today, you'd have to run WinNT, but it looks like SGI is committed to making Linux do 3D graphics well, in the very near future. There's gonna be some serious Linux goings on at SI99RAPH
The $800 US Phobos G160 Fast Ethernet boards attach to the Indigo2's proprietary GIO64 bus which has much higher bandwidth than the EISA bus.
Unfortunately, this card wasn't much faster than the built-in 10BaseT Ethernet with the drivers available for IRIX 6.2. A very depressing realization considering that the card costs more than eight times that of a PC 10/100BaseT card. I just started upgrading to IRIX 6.5.4 and it looks like performance has improved quite a bit.
mental ray , the renderer that most Softimage shops use, is already ported to Linux (x86 and Alpha) as well as many other flavors of Un*x. It lets a master machine farm out tiles to worker machines and it is multithreaded (takes advantage of SMP) as well.
I just wanted to emphasize that mental ray has been available on Linux x86 and Alpha for at least a couple of years now.
Another major rendering package, Pixar's Photorealistic Renderman Toolkit AKA PRman may already be available for Linux as well. I saw a demo at ACM/SIGGRAPH'98
I just hope that the various 3D modeling and animation packages are ported to Linux as well. The Sidefx Houdini port is a great first step, but I'm hoping that Alias|Wavefront Maya and Softimage|3D are not far behind.
The Monorail was beautiful, albeit underpowered. Black, anodized aluminum case. Pretty cool as far as computers go.
Sure it had its problems:
I think they should try the market out again given that active-matrix LCDs are so much cheaper, and they could probably use one of the many off the shelf NLX mainboards, and still have room for 2 PCI slots. They wouldn't have to waste a slot since Ethernet would be on the mainboard.
I believe the Linux box was used to reboot wedged SGI - Challenge XL render servers, which have special system controller ports.
read the file describing the configuration.
It's a Siliconrax SR-485 rack mount peripheral chassis with a built in 9" or 10" monitor
It also houses the Mylex DAC960SXI SCSI-SCSI 6 channel RAID controller, w/256MB cache.
I'd guess a Logical Volume Manager would be part of what SGI contributes to the free software commuity.
they're presenting a paper called:
sounds like they might be open sourcing XFS , cool!
req # | date posted| title
------+------------+---------------------------
35470 | 03/19/1999 | Linux Kernel Development Eng
35726 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer
35727 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer
35730 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer
35731 | 03/05/1999 | Linux Kernel Dev Engineer
35742 | 03/05/1999 | Systems Eng-Linux OS Dev
36186 | 04/30/1999 | Dekstop [sic] Linux Product Manager
------+------------+---------------------------
Here's an excerpt of the Responsibilities section of the marketing job (36186):
you do the math!The servers will have graphics (probably not accelerated 3D) since they will be designed to run both Linux and Micro$oft Windoze NT. A headless server would be a more reasonable option if NT wasn't part of the plan.
check out the press release
I hope the server is rackmountable, takes up 4U or less and has an LCDproc compatible display, especially if it's targeted at ISPs.
I skimmed this article at a local news stand. It claimed [very much paraphrased, consume with a Tbsp of salt] that Linux couldn't be considered an enterprise quality OS because:
IMHO, this article was lame because its conclusions were drawn without any benchmark evidence. Just because certain aspects of the Linux kernel aren't as elegant and buzzword compliant as they could be doesn't mean it doesn't kick ass in real production use.
here's the uptime for my Linux mailserver which supports six offices:
12:08am up 193 days, 16:28, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
the only reason its not longer is it wasn't connected to a UPS. The only time I had to reboot before that was when my company changed ISPs.
I skimmed this article at a local news stand. It claimed [very much paraphrased, consume with a Tbsp of salt] that Linux couldn't be considered an enterprise quality OS because:
IMHO, this article was lame because its conclusions were drawn without any benchmark evidence. Just because certain aspects of the Linux kernel aren't as elegant and buzzword compliant as they could be doesn't mean it does kick ass in real production use. here's my Linux mailserver's uptime: 12:08am up 193 days, 16:28, 1 user, load average: 0.05, 0.03, 0.00
the only reason its not longer is it wasn't connected to a UPS. The only time I had to reboot before that was when my company changed ISPs.