-- [ From: amp * EMC.Ver #2.3 ] -- obcrypto: i'd like to see how bruter.c would have run on their 'renderfarm'. MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIF. (Nov. 30) BUSINESS WIRE -Nov. 30, 1995--The making of "Toy Story," the stunning new movie from Walt Disney Pictures that is the world's first full-length completely computer-generated animated film, involved the use of more than 100 high-powered computers from Sun Microsystems -- which together comprised one of the most powerful graphics rendering engines ever created. =snip= For the movie, Pixar created a networked bank or "cluster" of 117 Sun(TM) SPARCstation(TM) 20 workstations -- each containing at least two microprocessors, and running on Sun's Solaris(TM) operating environment -- to handle the critical task of "rendering" each of the 114,000 frames in the 77-minute movie. =snip= Sun worked closely with a team from Pixar to create its RenderFarm, which serves as Pixar's central resource of computer processing power. The RenderFarm uses a network computing architecture in which a powerful SPARCserver(TM) 1000 acting as a "texture server" supplies the necessary data to the many rendering client workstations needed to complete the rendering process. The RenderFarm was assembled by Sun and Pixar engineers in less than a month and drew upon Sun's own experience in setting up "farms" of many systems linked together. Some facts about Pixar's RenderFarm and the computing aspects of "Toy Story": -0- -- The RenderFarm is one of the most powerful rendering engines ever assembled, comprising 87 dual-processor and 30 four-processor SPARCstation 20s and an 8-processor SPARCserver 1000. The RenderFarm has the aggregate performance of 16 billion instructions per second -- its total of 300 processors represents the equivalent of approximately 300 Cray 1 supercomputers. -- Each system is the size of a pizza box, and all 117 systems work in a footprint measuring just 19 inches deep by 14 feet long by 8 feet high. -- Sun is the price/performance leader, in Pixar's own rankings. The SPARCstation 20 HS14MP earned a rating of $80 per Rendermark (a Pixar measurement for rendering performance), while the comparable SGI Indigo Extreme came in at approximately $150 per Rendermark. -- Using one single-processor computer to render "Toy Story" would have taken 43 years of nonstop performance. -- Each of the movie's more than 1,500 shots and 114,000 frames were rendered on the RenderFarm, a task that took 800,000 computer hours to produce the final cut. Each frame used up 300 megabytes of data -- the capacity of a good-sized PC hard disk -- and required from two to 13 hours for final processing. -- In addition to the high-resolution final rendering, the RenderFarm was also used to generate the test images animators needed to plan and evaluate lighting, texture mapping and animation. Since fast response is key in doing tests, RenderMan could produce test frames in as little as a few seconds. -- Scalability is built-in: the RenderFarm can be upgraded (with more processors and disk storage) to a nearly four-fold performance level, without requiring any additional space. The RenderFarm also integrates seamlessly with Pixar's existing computer network containing different types of machines. =snip=