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DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal)
Linux Journal takes a
look at how Linux helps make movies. "All the big film studios
primarily use Linux for animation and visual effects. Perhaps no commercial
Linux installation is larger than DreamWorks Animation, with more than
1,000 Linux desktops and more than 3,000 server CPUs."
(Log in to post comments)
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 5, 2007 18:42 UTC (Tue) by dwheeler (subscriber, #1216) [Link] Google has tens of thousands of Linux systems. It's not even a contest.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 5, 2007 18:46 UTC (Tue) by flewellyn (subscriber, #5047) [Link] Yes, but Google is not in the film industry.
Besides, Google has (last I checked) several terabytes of RAM in their server cluster. Terabytes of RAM, not disk. Their disk space must be in the exobyte range at least; I don't even want to imagine what their power costs alone would be for the server cluster, let alone HVAC, bandwidth, and such. I read somewhere (can't recall the link) that Google alone accounts for 15% of the worldwide market in RAM and hard drives.
So really, saying "Google has 'em beat" is going to be a given in a LOT of ways.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 5, 2007 20:04 UTC (Tue) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] For servers there may be no contest, but for desktops? Does anyone know if Google uses Linux on the desktop too?
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 5, 2007 20:36 UTC (Tue) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] 1000 desktops is not even close to being largest. even if we restrictourselves to commercial deployments (e.g. not education, which tend to often be huge, or gov) there are deployments in the >10k range out there.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 4:38 UTC (Wed) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] I think that the article was saying that this is the largest deployment of Linux boxes dedicated for graphics _workstations_ in the movie industry, not the largest ever. The writer didn't realy do a very good job of getting that point across.
A lot of people who hear about Linux being used for high-end graphics they automaticly assume stuff like "Oh well of course they are using it in the servers/rendering, everybody knows that for film stuff {OS X, Windows XP} is standard."
When in relatity it's actually the Linux desktop is the one that dominates in this sort of arena.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 10:25 UTC (Wed) by hawk (subscriber, #3195) [Link] I recall reading that the engineers at Google get to choose if they want a Mac, Windows or Linux machine. (See http://www.businessreviewonline.com/os/archives/2007/02/g...)
Considering the extreme ratio of really techie people at Google, I would think that they must have a decent share of Linux desktops.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 2:10 UTC (Wed) by Nick (subscriber, #15060) [Link] Heh. I think SGI has several terabytes of RAM in a single machine!
... but doesn't Google have several hundred thousand PCs in their
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 5:28 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] I think it's over petabyte by now. I've heard from guys in Google that this estimate is pretty close to the reality - and Google built few new datacentres since then. And since they fight for reduced latency they should have systems with a lot of RAM rather than with a lot of disk. So my guess is that they have at least petabyte of RAM and less then exabyte of disk. But nobody knows for sure, obviously...
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 8:37 UTC (Wed) by arcticwolf (guest, #8341) [Link]
From the summary:
So there.
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 14:02 UTC (Wed) by briangmaddox (subscriber, #39279) [Link] And the previous sentence you omitted talked about the film industry. All these posts going way too literally over two sentences :)
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 10:40 UTC (Wed) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link] Times change. Terabytes used to be a terrible impressive word. There used to be Microsoft "Terraserver".
These days you can get a terabyte in a single normal SATA hard-disc (though 2*500GB is still cheaper) for a cost low enough that it's achievable for the average western teenager...
Terabytes of RAM is also not as impressive as it used to be. You get 1GB of RAM for aproximately $30. So a Terabyte of RAM is $30.000 or thereabouts -- assuming you get no discount whatsoever for buying a thousand of them at once (probably an unsound assumption)
OK, so it's not a single desktop-machine, but it's not "WOW" stuff either.
Yeah, it's hard for us old-timers. I saved up for quite some time to upgrade my Amiga to 1024KB of memory, from the original 512KB. And I used to be impressed with the Amiga -- a full order-of-magnitude improvement over my previous machine...
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 12:08 UTC (Wed) by rknop (guest, #66) [Link] I am sometimes struck when I notice a single file on my disk that would have filled the 50MB hard drive I had on my Amiga back in 1991....
-Rob
Google's got 'em beat Posted Jun 6, 2007 12:49 UTC (Wed) by hein.zelle (guest, #33324) [Link] Try ocean or atmosphere modelling. The output files of my models typically don't (or just) fit on the drive of my workstation (presently a laptop). That's been the case for the last 8 years, so the problem doesn't seem to be going away, either :-)
We will always push software as far as the hardware will go, I think.
DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal) Posted Jun 6, 2007 21:24 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link] It's nice and all that they use Linux so extensively, but quotes like:"A challenge we overcame on Shrek 3 was the integration of metadata into our pipeline", says Grant. "In a cross-team effort between R&D and Production Technology, we put in place a system that maintains historical version information, render statistics and other really valuable data in each and every file we produce. That we were able to do this shows one of the key advantages of having a proprietary toolset and file formats."does make we wonder why they don't work more towards open file formats and sharing technology, to spread out the cost of development. They talk about lots of Perl code that they want to convert to Python, how about slowly opening up some of that, and have the community have a go at it. Some of it might be useful, most of it will likely not be.
DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal) Posted Jun 6, 2007 22:04 UTC (Wed) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] I think that the word "proprietary" is used with the same meaning as "custom" here.
DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal) Posted Jun 6, 2007 22:19 UTC (Wed) by Zenith (subscriber, #24899) [Link] If that be the case, I hastily retract my comment :)
Not a native speaker, so although quite fluent, I do misunderstand things sometimes.
English usage Posted Jun 7, 2007 0:05 UTC (Thu) by xoddam (subscriber, #2322) [Link] No, no, you're both entirely correct. The advantage the DreamWorks guy ispleased to have is the advantage of complete freedom to define how his software works. Which is not typically an advantage of proprietary software you buy from somewhere *else*. It's something you get by developing your code in-house and not supporting other users, which is equally "proprietary".
Of course, DreamWorks gets this advantage as much by building on Free
DreamWorks Animation 'Shrek the Third': Linux Feeds an Ogre (Linux Journal) Posted Jun 7, 2007 14:26 UTC (Thu) by i3839 (subscriber, #31386) [Link] I'm not a native speaker either, but see xoddam's comment, he's spot on.
I pointed out the "custom" or "in-house" thing to make clear that the picture isn't as grim as it might look.
As for NIH/making it a community effort: They're quite big, probably big enough to not need anyone else. Opening it all up might help others too, those others being their rivals (of course long term it helps them too, but initially it won't. And the home users have much other requirements than them). The smaller studios working more together would make more sense.
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