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Former Member
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Att: CompuDude Re Renderfarm

Hi CompuDude

smile Is this who you work for

Pixar Builds Massive Renderfarm

Emeryville, Santa Clara And San Diego, CA, February 13, 2003. Pixar Animation Studios, the Academy Award-winning creator of "Toy Story" and Monsters, Inc.," today announced that it is working with Intel Corporation and RackSaver to create one of the most powerful computer installations ever used for digital animation.

Pixar's new RenderFarm, used to create the digital images for each frame of animation in its movies, will consist of 1024 Intel Xeon processors inside of eight new RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software.

The RenderFarm features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space. Each Intel Xeon processor at 2.8 GHz is about five times faster than the older RISC-based processors in Pixar's outgoing RenderFarm. Pixar is using the system for its film, "The Incredibles," scheduled for a 2004 release.

Each BladeRack contains 66 dual-processor servers in an innovative arrangement that provides excellent cooling for very dense clusters. Pixar worked closely with RackSaver and Intel on the design of the systems, which are built around the tailored Intel SE7500WV2 server board. Pixar also utilized the assistance of Intel Solution Services and the sophistication of Intel compilers and performance tuning tools to boost the performance of their RenderMan software by 50 percent on the Intel-based systems.

smile I heard you mention Renderfarm a few times and was aware it was a PIXAR program so I wondered if you worked for them

I hope you dont mind me asking

Best Regards
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[Edit 1 times, last edit by Former Member at Dec 30, 2004 7:56:04 PM]
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Former Member
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Re: Att: CompuDude Re Renderfarm

Nope. I wish, tho. love struck

Renderfarm is a generic term for "a bunch of computers used only to render individual frames of 3D graphics". They have a HUGE one (512 dual-processor systems), we have a small one, by their standards (30 dual-processor systems, possibly doubling this year). Both are used for the same basic purpose (although we only do movie trailers and title sequences, and television spots, as opposed to feature-length movies).

Renderfarms are essential to 3D work, as a 20 second clip, at 30 frames per second (standard video rate), is 600 individual frames that need to be calculated out (aka "rendered"). A single frame can take seconds to render, or hours, or even days. Most are around 10 minutes (in a good dual-processor system). So at 10 minutes per frame, that 20-second clip (600 frames) takes 6,000 minutes, or 100 hours (just over 4 days) to render, with one dual-processor computer. Putting our 30 rendernodes on the clip brings that to a more manageable 3 hours and 20 minutes, making it possible to get more than one try in per week. wink Pretty much any company that does much work in video CGI (computer-generated images) has to have a renderfarm of some sort to get any work done, unless they are only working with single, still frames.

Of course, while those animators are sleeping, or busy doing other work such as building the scene, the renderfarm is not rendering, and thus is sitting around doing nothing. Enter the World Community Grid. biggrin

The Pixar program is actually software called "RenderMan", which is the software that manages distributing a 3D sequence to multiple computers for rendering individual frames, and then reassembling the finished product as they finish. We use different software to accomplish the same task.

Thus endeth the primer. wink
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[Edit 2 times, last edit by Former Member at Dec 30, 2004 1:33:28 AM]
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