Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com) [LWN.net]

News.com reports on Pixar, which has switched from Unix systems to a Linux cluster for its image rendering. "While the financial impact of the individual contract may be negligible to Sun, the symbolism is tough to ignore. A number of film and entertainment studios in the past year have swapped out Unix computers containing reduced instruction set computer (RISC) processors, like Sun's UltraSparc III, in favor of systems running Linux and chips from Intel or from Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices."

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Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com)

Posted Feb 8, 2003 20:16 UTC (Sat) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (3 responses)

This is the "render farm", not the animators workstations. Linux has been in use in animators workstations for a long time now, I don't know how much at Pixar, but that's actually a more demanding application because it has a graphical display head. The render farm machines perform extremely coarse-grained multiprocessing. They are sent the information necessary to render a frame, and then they render that one frame for anything from a minute to a day. The renderer is a portable C program. It treats computers as a commodity - their value is in computes-per-second and not in any particular differentiating feature if the system meets some minimums for VM and network IO performance. The rest is just hardware speed. Blade systems are excellent for this, because they combine a lot of processing power in a small space without the high-speed interconnect that contributes so much cost to more tightly-coupled multiprocessor system.

Why Rackspace, a business mostly known as a colocation provider? I guess they are subcontracting the system maintainance.

Bruce

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com)

Posted Feb 8, 2003 21:57 UTC (Sat) by dhess (guest, #7827) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the author meant Racksaver (http://www.racksaver.com).

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com)

Posted Feb 9, 2003 22:25 UTC (Sun) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

That makes a lot more sense. Thanks!

Bruce

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com)

Posted Feb 14, 2003 7:45 UTC (Fri) by RackSaver (guest, #9639) [Link]

Bruce,

Yes, RackSaver not RackSpace. Unfortunately, there is an article circulating out there that lists RackSaver in one paragraph, then calls us RackSpace in the next...poor editing on that one.

Thanks,
Pete
pete@racksaver.com

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel (News.com)

Posted Feb 10, 2003 20:33 UTC (Mon) by dcoolidge (guest, #1390) [Link]

Sun is doing bad buisness by trying to use the courts (ie law suits) to make money rather than helping users. It makes sense that people will start migrating away from Sun if they are not supporting their users and spending time in court.