Comments on: Article on Grid Computing Planet about BBB Rendering

By: campbell barton

campbell barton — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:06:48 +0000

Using suns grid it would take ~10,000 cpu hrs to render, however we re-rendered a lot of frames.

By: campbell barton

campbell barton — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 22:04:15 +0000

blender running 1 hour on a single threaded 2.x ghz AMD Opteron with 4gig ram on solaris 11.

By: Aka

Aka — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:36:09 +0000

@Tim Formica- can u check submit news?

By: BlenderLovingSquirrel

BlenderLovingSquirrel — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 15:37:31 +0000

that's right! Who's your Daddy!?

By: Month3d

Month3d — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:34:54 +0000

"Sun Microsystems' (Nasdaq: JAVA) Network.com grid computing service played a key role in a new open source animated film."

So according to the article they did use sun microsystems :)

By: Robin

Robin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:32:57 +0000

uhmm…from the article's first line:

"Sun Microsystems' (Nasdaq: JAVA) Network.com grid computing service played a key role in a new open source animated film."

By: DramaKing

DramaKing — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 14:22:01 +0000

I thought that the rendering workstations were provided by Sun Microsystems.

By: Thomas Baron

Thomas Baron — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 13:23:35 +0000

To RedBirdiii :

A CPU-hour computing time is a convenient unit to show a quantity of computation power. For BBB, more than 50'000 hours of CPU means (for example) that they used 100 workstations with 2 CPU each during more than 250 hours : 100*2*250 = 50'000 hours of CPU.

As rendering a movie is a highly parallelizable task (you have 8 minutes, that is 8*60*30 = 14400 frames to render at 30fps, and each frame can be rendered independantly of the others) it doesn't matter if you use 200 CPU during 250 hours, or 400 CPU during 125 hours.

On a more extreme way, it matters if you use very few CPUs (resulting in a long rendering duration) or many many CPUs (eg more than 14400 CPU for 14400 frames, means you'll have to parallelize the rendering of a single picture accross many CPU)

To get it, just think than rendering BBB with your mono-CPU PC would take more than 50000 hours, that is, 5 years, 258 days and 8 hours. So instead of just push the render button, the team had to use a dedicated rendering solution, capable of driving the renderer software.

By: RedBirdiii

RedBirdiii — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 11:31:33 +0000

"the more than 50,000 CPU-hours of compute time"
What doest that mean? I don't get it!

By: RH2

RH2 — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 05:44:37 +0000

cool