Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital 210
An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
Re:6 megabytes? (Score:5, Informative)
No he didn't.
Re:Distributed.net... (Score:5, Informative)
The best I could find was this mirror of the FAQ [multyportal.com]. Since ProcessTree.com now belongs to a domain poacher, I'm guessing they never did find a paying client...
Re:6 Gigabytes on a 32bit CPU? (Score:5, Informative)
no reason to doubt 6GB (Score:4, Informative)
Linux, FreeBSD or Windows 2000 AS would support PAE allowing an app to use close to 4GB, leaving 2 GB for OS kernel , so seems reasonable.
Ay one who doesent believe me check at crucial.com. I wont provide a URL but look for IBM, Bladecenter, HS20
Re:6 Gigabytes on a 32bit CPU? (Score:2, Informative)
Of course its a bit faster to access 16Gb rather than 64Gb and faster againt access 4Gb for some PAE reason.
Re:Maybe they're right (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this (Score:5, Informative)
My part-time employer (when I'm not working for NASA/JPL) Maas Digital [maasdigital.com] just bought a copy of the software... it utilizes stochastic methods to allow flexible real-time raytrace rendering (with good motion blur!)
It turns out that motion blur in 3D graphics is a very hard problem because it's essentially a high-dimensional integral, and it turns out the best method of doing generalized high-dimensional numerical integration is a stochastic algorithm (monte carlo method) so it's not surprising to me that it's a great way to do motion blurs.
My favorite aspect of stochastic methods is their ability to be continuously refined (for instance, in a video game, the longer you spent looking at an object, the better it would get etc, and the graphics performance would degrade very smoothly with changes in system load etc). It is also ideal for parallel processing, as it can be dynamically parallelized to completely heterogeneous computing nodes.
Dan and I agree that there's going to be a lot of stochastic algorithms in the future of computer graphics (though he is hopeful that analytical methods will eventually make a comeback, as they have better asymptotic performance).
Cheers,
Justin Wick
Re:interconnect (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Renderfarms online - old news (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Renderfarms online - old news (Score:1, Informative)
Re:interconnect (Score:5, Informative)
Let's say for example, you set a particle generator to run 60 frames, emitting smoke from a point, like from a cigarette tip. Smoke particles start emitting on frame 1, and continue on their path, particles persist through frame 60 as they drift upwards in a path influenced by random air currents. If you roll forward to frame 30 and render the last half only, you start all over with no smoke from the first 30 frames, it starts from scratch, they emit right from the tip in a new smoke trail, there's no history of past particle movement. So you'd get a huge discontinuity if you rendered the frames in batches.
As far as I can tell, the actual image rendering doesn't influence the positions of the particles. It's just that they're calculated sequentially as each frame is rendered. Yeah, it's a huge pain and there aren't many good workarounds. But that's what you have to work with in order to use the particle generators, which are hugely powerful. Its the worst possible method, except for everything else anyone's ever thought of.
Re:Renderfarms online - old news (Score:1, Informative)
Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this (Score:3, Informative)
Re:interconnect (Score:1, Informative)