[NMLUG] Speaking of monitors... and CPUs

[niosop at gmail.com (Matthew Bowie)]

I think (and this is by no means authoritative), renderfarms now days are
usually running on x86 or x86-64 processors.  They have higher clock rates
(not so important), and are a a lot cheaper (important) because they're so
common and the pricewars between Intel and AMD tend to keep the prices low.
So even if it requires more processors than another architecture (and I'm
not sure that it does), it's still usually cheaper.

Have you seen Elephant's Dream (http://www.elephantsdream.org)?  It's a
pretty cool, open source movie done using Blender.  This particular one was
actually rendered using MacOS X Tiger on a cluster comprised of dual G5s on
the BSU Xseed cluster http://xseed.bowiestate.edu/.

As far as SNL and LANL, they all have several systems using different
archs.  Looking at
http://top500.org/sublist/Site.php?edit%5Blist_id%5D=3D27&edit%5Bcountry_id=
%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bvendor_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bregion_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bcontin=
ent_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bsegment_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bapplication_id%5D=3Dall&e=
dit%5Barchitecture_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bconnfam_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bconn_id%5D=
=3Dall&edit%5Bprocfam_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bsystemfamily_id%5D=3Dall&edit%5Bra=
nkf%5D=3D1&edit%5Brankt%5D=3D500&op=3DCreate+Sublist&edit%5Bform_id%5D=3Dfr=
mFieldsyou
can see that it seems like the x86 clusters tend to provide more
processing power per processor compared to the Alpha clusters.  Of course I
don't know what they actually use these systems for, or what the comparative
costs of the systems are.

Ok, that's enough useless info for one email,
Matthew


And that leads to another question: where do MIPS and Alpha processors
> stack up against today's Intel and AMD dual-cores? Okay, renderfarms
> need clustered processors regardless. The credit line on ICE AGE was
> to Compaq's "Renderplex Alpha System", which further investigation
> reveals to be comprised of 164 Alpha CPUs. But that was 2002 (eons
> ago!). What's the top choice of graphical processor today? What do
> LANL and SNL choose? Anyone know?
>
> Steve
> Stephen B. Browne
> sbrowne@ix.netcom.com
> "Ubi bene, ibi patria."
>

-- =

Matthew Bowie
Programmer/IT Consultant
niosop@gmail.com
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.b9.com/pipermail/nmlug/attachments/20060927/0a2e9837/atta=
chment.htm