Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital

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.

6MB?

[Biogenesis]

Shoulden't that read 6GB?

I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so. I'd like to see these machines, which rendered Lord of the Rings, use their nearly unlimited processing power to let me play a game -- perhaps Half-Life or Quake 2 with a new rendering DLL -- to spit out 60fps of pure ray-traced bliss.

Or just fire up InTrace [intrace.com] with a scene of 1 billion polygons of a super-detailed scene of sunflowers, with multiple reflections and all the other goodies, and crank it to 1600x1200.

I can dream, can't I? :)

One thing to say...

[linuxkrn]

seti@home!

Distributed.net...

[rthille]

Imagine distributed.net being a CPU co-op. They take problems from clients in need of a ton of CPU, farm it out to distributed.net members, and at the end of the month/year you get a small check for all the CPU cycles you spent helping solve problems.

Re:Distributed.net...

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Easy -- Make the 'money' be not real money, but a lack of ads/nagging.

Imagine getting prompted upon installing an application whether you want to A) pay B) have ads or C) donate cpu cycles.
This would then allow developers to make money off of their software without making it unusable due to ad annoyance (xfire, aim, most shareware)

Maybe they're right

[ctr2sprt]

Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S: The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.

They might mean 6MB of L2 cache. I don't know what cache sizes are available for Xeons, but probably when you order 1000 CPUs at once Intel are willing to give you hard-to-find stuff.

Renderfarms online - old news

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting anon as I have an interest in some of these companies :
http://www.respower.com/ - 250+ machines (~500GHz), 250GB ram
http://www.rendercore.com/ - 700 machines
http://www.render-it.co.uk/ - 82 cpus (131GHz), 82GB ram)

The only 'interesting' thing here is that it's WETA's farm. Other than that, I doubt they offer the wide selection of software (lest they struck deals lately) not to mention field experience with 'oddball' files.

Good luck to them, though

6 Gigabytes on a 32bit CPU?

[ProfessionalCookie]

Correct me if I'm wrong here but aren't the Xeons currently 32 bit? Doesn't that mean they can't address more than 4 Gigs? I thought that's what the whole big deal was with 64 bit. Now maybe if they were G5s...

Re:One thing to say...

[CGP314]

folding@home

I used to run seti@home instead of folding@home, but then one day I realized I needed to switch. While finding extraterrestrial life would be the most important development in human history to date, the chances of finding it in my lifetime are very small.

On the other hand, the chances of my getting cancer or any of the other of the diseases folding@home works on is very great. Plus, if folding@home cures any of these diseases, it will extend my life and increase the chances that extraterrestrials will be found within my lifetime.


-Colin [colingregorypalmer.net]

STOP THAT 6MB LAME JOKES

[robbyjo]

Please...

This may be an old news, but the details of that machine is here [sgi.com]. That's some stuff to drool over. Some excerpts:

... provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of nearline storage as a global storage repository ...

... create and manage up to 100TB of data ...

And now this machine is up for a rent. Here's [wetadigital.com] the company website.

Re:One thing to say...

[ckaminski]

No offense, but if I'm an ET, and the race I just dropped into visit hasn't gotten around to figuring out how to stop the #1 genetic suicide mechanism built into their own bodies, I'm NOT helping them.
Then again, that's the human in me talking.

Re:Maybe they're right

[drudd]

Trust me, 6 GB goes by very quickly.

So let's say I'm doing a simulation of structure formation in the universe.

I have a cube grid of cells, 512 on a side (my own code uses adaptive mesh refinement to increase resolution, but we'll ignore that for simplicity).

So each cell requires 3 floating variables to compute gravity, and 8 floating variables to calculate hydrodynamics. At 4 bytes per variable, that's a total of 5.5 GB just for the mesh.

Then you need to add dark matter particles, allow for star formation and cooling, track different element species, and data structures to allow for adaptive mesh refinement.... each of which have similar memory requirements.

Doug

Re:I don't see why not.

[torpor]

(i'm thinking less general-purpose computing purchase, and i think you are thinking more ...)

yeah, so i thought 6Megs was a typo at first, but then i considered the mere possibility that they may just have spec'ed their RAM to their direct process requirements, 'embedded system' style.

and, i still don't see why not... though your point about RAM being available in sizes less than 64 megs is valid, i've seen 8meg dimm's for 2ghz Pentium systems, cheap, all over the place. remember, this is new zealand we're talking about, not fry's, burbank. they want something easily replaceable, locally.

maybe then the question would be 'where did the other 2megs go', and that might answer your videocard situation. plenty of 2ghz Pentium mobo's do video sharing...

i know it doesn't make 'sense'. but, on the other hand, i don't see why not. why buy so much ram if you've determined that you don't really have to for your specific application? i've seen tons of systems designed, and put into exceptional use, that way ... not all general purpose computing laws (of economics, of use) are applicable in specific-purpose stuff ...

but hey, it could be a typo. 6gigs would 'make more sense', I suppose...