17 Dec
2007
17 Dec
'07
7:55 a.m.
Richard wrote:
In article <47668201.5020603 at gmail.com>,
Jules Richardson <jules.richardson99 at gmail.com> writes:
Oh, I know... I loved O2k systems (still do - would love to find one someday;
I haven't messed around with one for a few years now). I'm just not sure what
Weta Digital's exact setup was - I believe the systems were all fully
populated with CPUs, but I'm not sure what their memory config was.
My recollection is of 5 or 6 rows of dual-height cabs in their machine room,
about 6 per row, with a further row or two for disk storage. I seem to
remember that a few of the cabinets were split though - an O2k in one half,
but framebuffer hardware in the other. I'm not sure if they were supplied like
that by SGI as one of their stock models, or whether it was something custom
(when I worked with SGI on projects they were pretty good at tweaking
configuration on a per-site basis).
It was most impressive to see that much SGI kit in one place, anyway - it must
have been reasonably uncommon to find such a large-scale install in a
non-government institution.
Nowadays I expect it's all PC clusters running Linux :(
cheers
Jules
Interesting stuff. Weta Digital had a pretty
impressive room full of O2k
hardware rendering the Lord of the Rings effects back around 2001. I'm not
sure if they're even still using SGI, but the rows of double-height O2k
cabinets looked pretty stunning back then - it'd be interesting to find out
what their exact config was.
Each double height rack holds two system modules. Each system module
can hold 4 node boards. Each node board has 2 CPUs (initially R10k @
195 MHz, but later R12k at 300 MHz). Each node also has a chunk of
system memory, up to 4 GB. The memory is shared between all the CPUs
through a cross-bar based interconnection fabric that is scalable with
the CPUs, i.e. there is no shared bus. Its pretty interesting!