[Beowulf] 3d rendering cluster

[Rayson Ho]

The big irons are better in terms of admin cost I guess... Imagine you
only need to look at 1 box with hundreds of processors instead of 50
or so dual -CPU boxes to manage!

However, the cost of the huge SMP boxes is so expensive that you
consider to use other ways to get around the administrator overhead,
like using the "Rocks cluster" package. Also, use a distributed batch
system like Gridengine to manage the rendering jobs.

What you really need is a compute farm, instead of the traditional
supercomputer type of cluster.

http://www.rocksclusters.org/Rocks/
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

And the IA64/Itanic processors are slower than the AMD processors when
running real code, and AMD servers are less expensive :)

Rayson


On 5/23/05, Paul K Egell-Johnsen <paul.k.egell.johnsen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Furthermore, but this is off topic I guess, would a larger iron from
> SGI or SUN be better than a cluster for this kind of use (though we'd
> be loosing sound fx and AfterFX processing)?
>