On Saturday September 6 2003 08:12 am, ed tharp wrote:
> On Sat, 2003-09-06 at 08:42, HaywireMac wrote:
> > On 06 Sep 2003 08:25:37 -0400
> >
> > ed tharp <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> uttered:
> > > gee,, George Lucas, and Industrial Light and Magic choose
> > > Linux. AMD and NVidia just for that.
> > > the August Linux Journal has a great writeup about the
> > > Rackspace built linux powered ILM 'deathstar' render-farm.
> > > some 1500 AMD athlon 1600, on 750 MoBos, each with 2 gigs
> > > ram.
> > > ahhh to dream of such power... just wait a few years (like
> > > 20),, I swear I will have that much power.
> >
> > that's comparing apples and oranges. they are using Linux for
> > the raw power, not too support an advanced flat panel display.
> >
> > there's a difference between computing power and hardware
> > support, no?
> >
> > I betcha they still use Mac's at the end-user level, the Linux
> > rendering farms are just for nuclear-powered computing at the
> > level of drawing huge amounts of polygons in a short time (and
> > without crashing, LOL!).
>
> the article does not say what sort of display they are using,
> only that use Kodak Cineon for film capture, OpenEXR (an Open
> Source Software released by ILM) as a new floating point image
> format, and does mention that Cinepaint (formerly
> Film-Gimp),Alais|wavefront Maya, pixar renderman and Mental
> Images Mental Ray as the software run. It does say however that
> the desktops are Linux, and that after everyone goes home,
> instead of shutting them down, they are included in the cluster
> for use as render nodes, considerably increasing the load that
> can be handled (some 70 terrabytes of info a day over the
> network).
These large enterprises sign licensing agreements, and make
deals for closed source proprietary hardware support. They'd need
to in any event because of their specialized needs, regardless of
OS. Something the open source community can't and won't do.
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
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Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
