I'm in a similar (but less extreme) situation. We've had very good luck by having all the team connected to the same IM chat (we use our own Jabber server). Anytime you need to ask a quick question, you just use the chat. The other guy can answer when he has time, and everyone else sees what's going on and can chip in if they also have suggestions. It's also good for just chatting and keeping in touch.
This is a very good point -- if you start thinking of your milage in terms of "person-miles" per gallon (PMPGs) then it really quickly makes alot of sense to carpool. A huge SUV @ 10 mpg with 4 passengers gets better PMPGs than almost any single-occupant vehicle. With email, PDA's, cell phones, etc..., flexible car pool management is easier than ever too. Plus, you might make some new friends in the process.
Are these people temps or do they have full-time jobs? Must be a real challenge to find that many people with experience in this sort of thing. I imagine they do alot of training? Anyone know?
> Servers in renderwall: 1,600 Processors (total): 3,200
Anyone know what these are? Dual Xeons? Do they take advantage of fast graphics hardware to speed up the rendering?
> Processors added 10 weeks before movie wrapped: 1,000
Making for a total of 4,200? About 30% more capacity 10 weeks before the end. So they added 1000 processors just to save about 3 weeks!
> Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
Assuming farenheit, that actually seems high.
> Fahrenheit Weight of air conditioners needed to maintain that temperature: 1/2 ton
This seems low...
> STORAGE Near online: 72 terabytes
What would this be? Robot DVD archive or something?
> Digital backup tape: 0.5 petabyte (equal to 50,000 DVDs)
What kind of tapes are these? Last I checked, IDE-RAID was a better bargain than tapes and DVD archives.
> Number of f/x shots: 1,400 > Minimum number of frames per shot: 240
This is confusing -- so a minimum of 1,400x240 frames = 224 minutes of shots but the screen time of F/X shots is quoted as 120 minutes...
> Average time to render one frame: 2 hours
Is this on the whole farm? If so, that's 76 years. If that's on a single processor, then the farm should be able to render the whole movie in 160 hours -- and you hardly need such a big farm. Must be rendering a frame uses several processors?
Is it really true that solar cells cost more energy to make than they can produce? Back of the envelope sanity check. I have a 10 watt panel here which cost $100 and which is rated for a 20 year life. Average solar insolation in, say, Arizona might be equivalent of 5 hours/day of full sun. That means:
10 watts * 5 hours * 365 days * 20 years = 365KW hours lifetime energy production.
I'd have a hard time believing that making this panel actually used 365 KWH. That's a ton of power. At industrial costs ($0.10/KWH?) that much power might cost $40 which is probably more than the entire fab cost for this panel...
See: http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/ for a really nifty piece of free bridge design & testing software from West Point (the Army military academy). It's lots of fun and the best bridges each year win scholarships (to any college) with nice notebook PCs for the runner ups.
-Bill
What's the point? They talk about far future applications requiring formation flying. Sounds fine, but is formation flying really going to be the big challenge 20 years from now when we put a very-long-baseline replacement for Hubble up? I don't think so. Why research it now anyway? Just sounds like these guys wanted an excuse to goof around with cute little satellites. Am I being too cynical? Seems like there are better things to do with the brains, money and payload space.
It's pretty affordable to rent a huge generator system mounted on a tractor-trailer. Probably have plenty of power to keep everything running. Maybe make the power company reimburse you even?
Anything futuristic/sci-fi. Sci-fi authors? Local professors/futurists talking about the future of X...
Segway - it's sortof becoming a joke, but they are fun to ride. Find someone local who has one. Talk about the control system, give people rides. A local electronics distributor who wanted our business conned us into letting them give a short seminar on their line card by bringing 2 segways for us all to ride.
Robots - Any cool robot researchers in the area? Have them talk & make sure they bring some hardware for show & tell.
NASA/Space - Any NASA centers near by? See if someone would be willing to give a talk on something cool.
What a shame! I can remember when a Sun 3/50 was the coolest machine around! Mine was an 8MB model!:-)
I remember thinking in the late '80's that Sun was making a huge mistake by not pushing a good SunOS distribution for commodity PC's. I guess they eventually did, but I think it was too late!
The laptop has a poor CPU/$ ratio and those little laptop drives aren't very speedy compared to the average 3.5" disk.
Best bang for the buck is probably an off-the-shelf compact system with a low-end processor in it. Use power management and a LCD screen and the power consumption/heat won't be too bad. Replace the fans with quiet ones and tuck it in a corner somewhere. Go see what's available cheap at the big chains, or check out the compact machines that Dell is making these days...
Why did NASA choose the shuttle design anyway? They took a perfectly good spaceship and added wings, control surfaces, tail, landing gear, etc... just so it could fly home like a plane. Lot's of heavy stuff just to switch from an inherently-safe re-entry method (ballistic with heat shield&chute) to a much more risky one (landing like a plane).
I don't see how the "plane" part of the design is worth it... Just cuz it's sexy?
Anton at Design Concept jewelry did a fantastic job for us. Fast, beautiful, artistic work, and very reasonably priced. Check him out:
http://www.dcjdirect.com/
-Bill
With most of the silicon bugs fixed, people are still getting pretty poor performance. I think it's still the compilers though. I ran a bunch of benchmarks for image processing applications and saw about 1/2 the performance one might expect from the architecture. The same routines from Intel's hand-optimized IPP library for XScale were blazingly fast... This suggests that the chip is fine but we need a decent compiler that knows how to take good advantage of the XScale's pipelined architecture and instruction set.
So the big question becomes, why is Intel waiting for someone else to write the compiler? Ultimately, what's the point of making good silicon if you don't support it with decent tools?
I had a *really* good experience with these guys:
www.dcjdirect.com
You can give them a good idea of what you want and they'll do the rest -- and they're fast, efficient and reasonably priced. I sent them some ideas by email -- we went back and forth on it a few times, and then they made it in about 4 days! Really pretty work too. They also have some neat titanium stuff pre-made.
-Bill
Re:See a picture of the complex here
on
Building the A380
·
· Score: 0
What's that? The plane they take prospective buyers on a ride with? You can bet no airline will ever order a plane with that much wasted space -- even for 1st class. They'll cram seats in as tight as they can get! Still, it looks pretty cool... I'd buy one:-)
I think I'd agree with S.F. These things aren't really very suitable for sidewalks. I've ridden one a few times and can contribute two observations:
1. They don't stop very quickly from full speed
2. They can't make tight turns above a certain speed
Compared to a bicycle travelling at the same speed, these things are both harder to stop and less maneuverable. If it's reasonable to ban bikes, I can't see allowing a segway...
As encryption gets stronger and stronger and as evil corperations (tm) put more and more money into these things, it won't always be trivial to crack... There will come a day when cracking this sort of thing will be a huge effort -- that's the danger, and saying "it will just be cracked" is trivializing the problem.
The ships look like WWII vessels, but the battles and the tactics involved (very close range slug-fests) seem much more like the days of wooden ships and iron men. In fact, the ships are wood and the BB's are simply tiny cannon balls. Would be fun to try this with sailing ships I think!
I have a CompactFlash based player which I really like. The player itself connects via USB and looks just like a flash-drive or microdrive so it should play well with almost any OS. Also handy for transfering files, etc... plus you can pop the card in your digital camera or, with an adapter, in your laptop, palmtop, etc... Plus, CF keeps getting bigger and cheaper so your player is easy to upgrade. Mine is a MoveMan SP-100 but there are a bunch out there that use CF cards.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm in a similar (but less extreme) situation. We've had very good luck by having all the team connected to the same IM chat (we use our own Jabber server). Anytime you need to ask a quick question, you just use the chat. The other guy can answer when he has time, and everyone else sees what's going on and can chip in if they also have suggestions. It's also good for just chatting and keeping in touch.
I've had great luck with RAIDCore's SATA controllers -- very fast.
-Bill
This is a very good point -- if you start thinking of your milage in terms of "person-miles" per gallon (PMPGs) then it really quickly makes alot of sense to carpool. A huge SUV @ 10 mpg with 4 passengers gets better PMPGs than almost any single-occupant vehicle. With email, PDA's, cell phones, etc..., flexible car pool management is easier than ever too. Plus, you might make some new friends in the process.
Agreed! Thanks for the well thought out answers. It's fun to see interviews like these. -Bill
> IT staff: 35 & Visual f/x staff: 420
:-)
Are these people temps or do they have full-time jobs? Must be a real challenge to find that many people with experience in this sort of thing. I imagine they do alot of training? Anyone know?
> Servers in renderwall: 1,600 Processors (total): 3,200
Anyone know what these are? Dual Xeons? Do they take advantage of fast graphics hardware to speed up the rendering?
> Processors added 10 weeks before movie wrapped: 1,000
Making for a total of 4,200? About 30% more capacity 10 weeks before the end. So they added 1000 processors just to save about 3 weeks!
> Temperature of equipment rooms: 76 degrees
Assuming farenheit, that actually seems high.
> Fahrenheit Weight of air conditioners needed to maintain that temperature: 1/2 ton
This seems low...
> STORAGE Near online: 72 terabytes
What would this be? Robot DVD archive or something?
> Digital backup tape: 0.5 petabyte (equal to 50,000 DVDs)
What kind of tapes are these? Last I checked, IDE-RAID was a better bargain than tapes and DVD archives.
> Number of f/x shots: 1,400
> Minimum number of frames per shot: 240
This is confusing -- so a minimum of 1,400x240 frames = 224 minutes of shots but the screen time of F/X shots is quoted as 120 minutes...
> Average time to render one frame: 2 hours
Is this on the whole farm? If so, that's 76 years. If that's on a single processor, then the farm should be able to render the whole movie in 160 hours -- and you hardly need such a big farm. Must be rendering a frame uses several processors?
In all, very confusing...!
-Bill
Is it really true that solar cells cost more energy to make than they can produce? Back of the envelope sanity check. I have a 10 watt panel here which cost $100 and which is rated for a 20 year life. Average solar insolation in, say, Arizona might be equivalent of 5 hours/day of full sun. That means:
10 watts * 5 hours * 365 days * 20 years = 365KW hours lifetime energy production.
I'd have a hard time believing that making this panel actually used 365 KWH. That's a ton of power. At industrial costs ($0.10/KWH?) that much power might cost $40 which is probably more than the entire fab cost for this panel...
See: http://bridgecontest.usma.edu/ for a really nifty piece of free bridge design & testing software from West Point (the Army military academy). It's lots of fun and the best bridges each year win scholarships (to any college) with nice notebook PCs for the runner ups. -Bill
What's the point? They talk about far future applications requiring formation flying. Sounds fine, but is formation flying really going to be the big challenge 20 years from now when we put a very-long-baseline replacement for Hubble up? I don't think so. Why research it now anyway? Just sounds like these guys wanted an excuse to goof around with cute little satellites. Am I being too cynical? Seems like there are better things to do with the brains, money and payload space.
Just after I get my flying car!
It's pretty affordable to rent a huge generator system mounted on a tractor-trailer. Probably have plenty of power to keep everything running. Maybe make the power company reimburse you even?
Anything futuristic/sci-fi. Sci-fi authors? Local professors/futurists talking about the future of X...
Segway - it's sortof becoming a joke, but they are fun to ride. Find someone local who has one. Talk about the control system, give people rides. A local electronics distributor who wanted our business conned us into letting them give a short seminar on their line card by bringing 2 segways for us all to ride.
Robots - Any cool robot researchers in the area? Have them talk & make sure they bring some hardware for show & tell.
NASA/Space - Any NASA centers near by? See if someone would be willing to give a talk on something cool.
Cheers,
-Bill
What a shame! I can remember when a Sun 3/50 was the coolest machine around! Mine was an 8MB model! :-)
I remember thinking in the late '80's that Sun was making a huge mistake by not pushing a good SunOS distribution for commodity PC's. I guess they eventually did, but I think it was too late!
-Bill
The laptop has a poor CPU/$ ratio and those little laptop drives aren't very speedy compared to the average 3.5" disk.
Best bang for the buck is probably an off-the-shelf compact system with a low-end processor in it. Use power management and a LCD screen and the power consumption/heat won't be too bad. Replace the fans with quiet ones and tuck it in a corner somewhere. Go see what's available cheap at the big chains, or check out the compact machines that Dell is making these days...
-Bill
Best stuff is here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/rgw/ww w/TsaiCode.html
Do you work in a dry place? Heated in winter and/or air conditioned in summer? Try a humidifier -- works well for me!
-Bill
Why did NASA choose the shuttle design anyway? They took a perfectly good spaceship and added wings, control surfaces, tail, landing gear, etc... just so it could fly home like a plane. Lot's of heavy stuff just to switch from an inherently-safe re-entry method (ballistic with heat shield&chute) to a much more risky one (landing like a plane). I don't see how the "plane" part of the design is worth it... Just cuz it's sexy?
Anton at Design Concept jewelry did a fantastic job for us. Fast, beautiful, artistic work, and very reasonably priced. Check him out: http://www.dcjdirect.com/ -Bill
With most of the silicon bugs fixed, people are still getting pretty poor performance. I think it's still the compilers though. I ran a bunch of benchmarks for image processing applications and saw about 1/2 the performance one might expect from the architecture. The same routines from Intel's hand-optimized IPP library for XScale were blazingly fast... This suggests that the chip is fine but we need a decent compiler that knows how to take good advantage of the XScale's pipelined architecture and instruction set.
So the big question becomes, why is Intel waiting for someone else to write the compiler? Ultimately, what's the point of making good silicon if you don't support it with decent tools?
I had a *really* good experience with these guys: www.dcjdirect.com You can give them a good idea of what you want and they'll do the rest -- and they're fast, efficient and reasonably priced. I sent them some ideas by email -- we went back and forth on it a few times, and then they made it in about 4 days! Really pretty work too. They also have some neat titanium stuff pre-made. -Bill
What's that? The plane they take prospective buyers on a ride with? You can bet no airline will ever order a plane with that much wasted space -- even for 1st class. They'll cram seats in as tight as they can get! Still, it looks pretty cool... I'd buy one :-)
I think I'd agree with S.F. These things aren't really very suitable for sidewalks. I've ridden one a few times and can contribute two observations:
1. They don't stop very quickly from full speed
2. They can't make tight turns above a certain speed
Compared to a bicycle travelling at the same speed, these things are both harder to stop and less maneuverable. If it's reasonable to ban bikes, I can't see allowing a segway...
As encryption gets stronger and stronger and as evil corperations (tm) put more and more money into these things, it won't always be trivial to crack... There will come a day when cracking this sort of thing will be a huge effort -- that's the danger, and saying "it will just be cracked" is trivializing the problem.
The ships look like WWII vessels, but the battles and the tactics involved (very close range slug-fests) seem much more like the days of wooden ships and iron men. In fact, the ships are wood and the BB's are simply tiny cannon balls. Would be fun to try this with sailing ships I think!
I have a CompactFlash based player which I really like. The player itself connects via USB and looks just like a flash-drive or microdrive so it should play well with almost any OS. Also handy for transfering files, etc... plus you can pop the card in your digital camera or, with an adapter, in your laptop, palmtop, etc... Plus, CF keeps getting bigger and cheaper so your player is easy to upgrade. Mine is a MoveMan SP-100 but there are a bunch out there that use CF cards.