On Tue, Nov 29, 2005 at 10:31:24AM -0500, Bob Shell wrote: > > On Nov 29, 2005, at 8:29 AM, Rob Studdert wrote: > > >Interesting, I attend film industry technology talks (irregularly > >granted) and > >I'm surprised about what you are saying. > > > > Yes, but I'll bet you aren't going to California for those talks! > > >Again interesting, I hadn't heard of Mac farms usually they tend to > >use PC > >servers running some form of UNIX, maybe they are now harnessing > >the UNIX side > >of the Macs now that the OS has grown up? > > Could be. I don't know the folks who built this system, just read > the numerous articles about it while it was being built and tested. > The current Mac OS is certainly exceptionally stable.
I used to work for SGI during the transitional period from dedicated high-end rendering systems to clusters of low-end computers. Most of the render farms I know of are Linux servers using commodity hardware (Intel or AMD processors, PCI I/O, Ethernet), although at least one major studio switched to Windows boxes (look for HP in the credits). The graphics art department (character design, textures, etc.) quite often used Macs, but all the animation, modelling, etc. was done with complex packages - either proprietary or third party. These were, in general, initially available on Unix (Solaris, IRIX, etc.), and were ported to Linux very early on. Many of the third-party packages, and even some of the in-house proprietary systems, were also ported to Windows; porting a Posix-compliant application isn't very difficult. Some research groups at Universities did put together Mac-based rendering systems, especially once the cost per compute cycle on a Mac became more or less competitive with the Intel processors. But as far as I know (and I still have a few friends in the industry, including at least one of those sys admins mentioned in the credits) renmdering continues to be done mostly on Intel/Linux render farms, either in-house or, increasingly, using rented time on systems at manufacturers.
