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CJ, <br>
<br>
This article is from 14 years ago, but it might be relevant to your
situation. It describes how Digital Domain used a Linux 'render
farm' to do the GCI for Titanic. I haven't read this article in 14
years, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but I think you might
learn something useful from it. <br>
<br>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494">http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2494</a><br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">Prentice Bisbal
Manager of Information Technology
Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2)
Rutgers University
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://rdi2.rutgers.edu">http://rdi2.rutgers.edu</a>
</pre>
<br>
On 11/03/2012 10:12 AM, CJ O'Reilly wrote:
<blockquote
cite="mid:CA+BX9iMNSYdOUjk0MQDFur0zYGB1nofNXqOX5Sgvh6OZLgm3iw@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">Thank you very much!<br>
I'll be sure to talk to the software developer about this.<br>
For now this project is moving slowly; still doing research (it's
possible simply a single powerful computer could get this work
done feasibly...)<br>
Perhaps I'll be back around in the future though!<br>
<br>
Thanks a bundle:)<br>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Nov 3, 2012 at 9:50 PM, Lux,
Jim (337C) <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov" target="_blank">james.p.lux@jpl.nasa.gov</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div
style="font-size:14px;font-family:Calibri,sans-serif;word-wrap:break-word">
<ol>
<li>Yes and no.. The application process needs to be
"parallel aware", but for some applications that could
just mean running multiple instances, one on each
node, and farming the work out to them. This is called
"embarassingly parallel" (EP).. A good example would
be rendering animation frames. Typically each frame
doesn't depend on the frames around it so you can just
parcel the work at a frame granularity to the nodes.
There are other applications which are more tightly
coupled and where the computation process running on
node N needs to know something about what's running on
Node N+1 and Node N-1 very frequently. For this,
applications use some sort of standardized process
communication library (e.g. MPI), or, perhaps a
library that performs a high level function (e.g.
Matrix inversion) that underneath uses the
interprocess comm.</li>
</ol>
<div>2. Another "it depends". If the process is EP, and
each node is processing a different image, then your
problem is one of sending and retrieving images, which
isn't much different from a conventional file server
kind of model. If multiple processors/nodes are working
on the same image, then the interconnect might be more
important. It all depends on the communication
requirements. Note that even EP applications can get
themselves fouled up in network traffic (imagine booting
1000 nodes simultaneously, with them all wanting to
fetch the boot image from one server simultaneously)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>This is the place to ask..</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<span>
<div style="border-right:medium
none;padding-right:0in;padding-left:0in;padding-top:3pt;text-align:left;font-size:11pt;border-bottom:medium
none;font-family:Calibri;border-top:#b5c4df 1pt
solid;padding-bottom:0in;border-left:medium none">
<span style="font-weight:bold">From: </span>CJ
O'Reilly <<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:supaiku@gmail.com" target="_blank">supaiku@gmail.com</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Date: </span>Wednesday,
October 31, 2012 11:31 PM<br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">To: </span>"<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org" target="_blank">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>"
<<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:beowulf@beowulf.org" target="_blank">beowulf@beowulf.org</a>><br>
<span style="font-weight:bold">Subject: </span>[Beowulf]
Digital Image Processing via HPC/Cluster/Beowulf -
Basics<br>
</div>
<div>
<div class="h5">
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<div>Hello, I hope that this is a suitable place
to ask this, if not, I would equally appreciate
some advice on where to look in lue of answers
to my questions:<br>
You may guess that I'm very new to this subject.<br>
<br>
I am currently researching the feasibility and
process of establishing a relatively small HPC
cluster to speed up the processing of large
amounts of digital images.
<br>
<br>
After looking at a few HPC computing software
solutions listed on the Wikipedia comparison of
cluster software page (
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cluster_software"
target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_cluster_software</a>
) I still have only a rough understanding of how
the whole system works.<br>
<br>
I have a few questions:<br>
1. Do programs you wish to use via HPC platforms
need to be written to support HPC, and further,
to support specific middleware using parallel
programming or something like that?<br>
OR<br>
Can you run any program on top of the HPC
cluster and have it's workload effectively
distributed? --> How can this be done?<br>
2. For something like digital image processing,
where a huge amount of relatively large images
(14MB each) are being processed, will network
speed, or processing power be more of a limiting
factor? Or would a gigabit network suffice?<br>
3. For a relatively easy HPC platform what would
you recommend?<br>
<br>
Again, I hope this is an ok place to ask such a
question, if not please help refer me to a more
suitable source.<br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</span>
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</blockquote>
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-- <br>
<img moz-do-not-send="true"
src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v202/CrashOveride/sijir-1.gif"><br>
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</pre>
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