What is Digg?46 Comments
- mattsidesinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+32It's OK, they are not yet fully operational.
- DeathBorn, on 10/12/2007, -2/+31I sense a disturbance in the force....as if millions of nerds suddenly screamed "THAT IS SO AWESOME!" and fainted.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Notice the name of the machines?
http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6153543-5.html?tag=ne.gall.pg
Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. - elnerdo, on 10/12/2007, -2/+12Also, I need some giant rotating tapes. Without large rotating magnetic tapes, how will I know that it's a supercomputer?
- ahughes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5But is it "Vista Ready"???
- phlux, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5I actually was the data center designer who designed that campus with a few others from the firm RLS in SF.
The room is ~12000 SF. There were a number of things that were not used from the original design in production - but overall the room operates as intended.
The racks shown in pic 4 are what was called the "interconnect matrix" which is where all the rows in the room were cabled back to with the idea to be able to interconnect any rack with any other rack.
Originally the design, which was fiber to the desktop, called for the ability to use all graphics workstations as nodes in the render farm. I don't know if they made it to that as they cut a large amount out of the budget just prior to going live.
There were ~400 10G ports in the network - but I can only imagine the count is higher now. Its been two years+ since I have been in there. I wanted to make it as death star looking as possible but Lucas wasnt really interested in that. - DrMatt, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Awesome! Now I want to see Pixar's render farm!
- mandarin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5AMD Opterons wooo!
- Linkage155, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4They get a check on everything but the videocard!
- chucali, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5where are the cool neon lights
- Scott2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4"cool" and "neon lights" == oxymoron.
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3They're having a hell of a time with that Vista DRM. Can't get any HD video to play.
- Linkage155, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Here you go sir, http://digg.com/hardware/Pictures_of_PIXAR_s_rendering_farm
Much smaller, but again, ILM is huge compared to pixar; - Pelapp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Im actually kind of unimpressed by 110 terabytes...
- OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3[quote]I sure hope they opt to use a lot of practical effects of Indy IV - another CG mess like the Star Wars prequals will be a disaster for Indy![/quote]
Indy will have a comical CGI sidekick for the first time. Details are still pretty scarce, but he's rumored to have a sort of hybrid Indian-Jamaican accent and an unusually high-pitched voice.
Actually, Harrison Ford himself will be CGI throughout most of the movie, and there will be several martial arts scenes with him fighting ninjas and pirates in bullet time on a secret Nazi space station. - crashflow, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2i hope the one holding data about jar jar binks fails...permanently.
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Looks more like 138TB to me with that last spike in the graph.
- gerkin, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2High availability? hehe I doubt it ;) Probbaly got a couple of Titan's sitting there with enptry racks waiting for more modules to install too :)
- BugMeNot2, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Computer Graphics World has a good article on ILM's studio.
http://www.angstrom.com/about/outside_news/CGW_ILM_storage_studio.htm - OBKenobi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Now this is more like it. Much better than those Darth Goofy and carbonite Jar-Jar pics from yesterday.
Ok, so where is the terminal to disable the tractor beam? - antdude, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1End date said July 2004 I think.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I wonder if all the Dells on the floor in the first pic are doing much now? :) But then again, every CPU helps in a render farm....
- Wedge1212, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1very impressive! We use Netapp's at my shop. :)
- jerfoo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Check out frame: http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6153543-7.html?tag=ne.gall.pg
Says they're using network-attached storage. Is "network-attached storage" a generic name for SAN and/or NAS? Or do they really mean that ILM is using a bunch of NAS? I always thought SANs were better, through-put-wise.
Anyone care to comment? - zcreem, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2So you have ***** for brains, and I thought it was only a saying to insult people.
- stupidfathead, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2Porno for Geeks
- whisk3rs, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6153543-9.html?tag=ne.gall.pg
They've started rendering Indiana Jones IV?
Wonder which machine they call Darth Vader... - Boofster, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I want a Verrari Enzo server.
- clearrecrd, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1About 110 terabytes....
http://news.com.com/2300-1026_3-6153543-8.html?tag=ne.gall.pg
nice... - Jemulov, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Impressive...
Most impressive. - gimpbully, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1i'm so sick of these clustered NAS things. Yes, you are correct, you can get much better throughput out of a SAN using a clustered filesystem than with one of these clustered NAS things. You also have far more options as far as configurability and the ability to do a great deal more data lifecycle management stuff. Many of these clustered NAS setups also have seemingly arbitrary limits on how large the namespace can be (yes, most filesystems have a namespace boundary, but these cluster NASs have ones in the TB->single PB range. I know that sounds like plenty, but it gets limiting very quickly in these sorts of situations. Also, expansion of existing hardware is neigh impossible (ie: adding more network interfaces equates to adding another NAS unit, that's not very cost effective. And those records the NAS people talk about, they're crap. you can't get 4GB/s throughput from these without truly massive clusters involving hundreds of NAS units. If you're talking about using these clustered NASs as a backend to a compute cluster, you'd better be sure you're not going to need things like MPIIO, these things just don't support it.
Taking a step back, though, the clustered NAS *does* have it's place. If you don't need to squeeze every last bit of throughput and latency out of your filesystem or want to save a bit of money, these are the way to go. - dipwizard, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0-- NetApp Breaks Performance Record
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1975841,00.asp
Network Appliance announced on June 12, 2006 that it has broken a standard network file system performance record using the first version of its new operating system for clustered NAS. (OnTap GX - which is OnTap and Spin OS together which ILM appears to be using)
Going up against the industry's SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corp.) SFS97_R1 benchmark, 24 nodes of NetApp's new Data ONTAP GX high-performance operating system worked together under a single namespace to deliver 1,032,461 SPECsfs97_R1.v3 operations per second, with a corresponding overall response time of 1.53 milliseconds, a NetApp spokesperson said. - Freddfx, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I doubt they're using IDE drives in RAID 0
110T worth of SCSI drives (possibly in RAID 5) is a lot of drives O_o - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1Dell.....on the floor...
- cvk_b, on 10/12/2007, -2/+2Love the graphs.
- ikiris, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I have 50 terrabytes just in shared folders/personal folders at work..so 110 isn't too big, maybe for a bunch of netapp boxes that's a lot
- ziki, on 10/12/2007, -1/+1They better have terrorist insurance
- iNoles, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1if they are fully operational like Death Star got ultimate firepowers that your never seen before in the servers?
- scabbers, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I hope they aren't using the infamous 75 gxp deathstars
- Scott2, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Problem is that photo #10 is the only one thats really impressive.
- naxx, on 10/12/2007, -3/+1What OS are they running? Windows?
- aserer511, on 10/12/2007, -3/+116 gigs of ram? 16...my ***** has more memory....
- starfisch, on 10/12/2007, -5/+0The computing power behind ILM's new world order
=x
THEY'RE AT MY DOOOOOOR - dn11, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1I sure hope they opt to use a lot of practical effects of Indy IV - another CG mess like the Star Wars prequals will be a disaster for Indy!
- etgsgroup, on 10/12/2007, -6/+0I think same they are not yet fully operational.
- dagr8tim, on 10/12/2007, -11/+2@ DeathBorn
More like "I sense a disturbance in the force....as if millions of nerds suddenly screamed "THAT FREAKING AWESOME!" and splooged in their pants."
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