[geeks] [Fwd: Pixar's new render farm: Linux on Intel]

[Shawn Wallbridge]

Pixar switches from Sun to Intel 
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983898.html

Pixar Animation Studios, which brought the world Monsters Inc. and Toy
Story, is switching from Sun Microsystems to Intel, as the melodrama in
the server market heats up. 

The Emeryville, Calif.-based film studio is replacing servers from Sun
in its render farm--a bank of servers that fuses artists' images into
finished film frames--with eight new blade servers from Rackspace. In
all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and
it runs the open-source Linux operating system. 

Pixar installed the Rackspace system over the previous six months and
will use it to develop its next film, The Incredibles, which will likely
hit theaters in 2004.  

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. 

Last July, for instance, Industrial Light and Magic replaced RISC-based
computers running Unix on artist workstations from SGI, choosing instead
Dell desktops containing Intel chips and Linux software. ILM also
installed a rendering farm running AMD's Athlon processors. Other
Intel-Linux installations took place at DreamWorks and Sony Pictures'
Imageworks. 

"We've got coverage now with the brand marquee companies," said Tom
Gibbs, director of industry marketing at Intel. "This is a complete
migration. They are moving off Sun Solaris and onto Intel-based servers
running Linux." 

While Intel-based servers are generally less expensive than
Unix-RISC-based servers, Gibbs asserted that the conversion is taking
place because the performance gap between the two types of setups has
largely been erased, and even reversed for certain functions. 

"They (film studios) will pay what they have to pay to get the image
quality," Gibbs said. 

As part of the switch to Intel for rendering, Pixar has ported its
Renderman software to run on Linux. 

Sun and AMD both submitted bids on the Pixar deal, sources said. Pixar
and Sun did not return calls for comment. 

The conversion to Intel systems is something of a bottom-up--as opposed
to top-down--phenomenon in the entertainment industry. Many of the
studios have installed these servers in render farms, where repetitive,
brute-force computing power is required. Unix-RISC workstations, on the
other hand, remain popular for more sophisticated tasks; artists who
"draw" scenes depend on them. But Intel-Linux systems are beginning to
catch on there as well. 

The likely next area where the Unix-RISC and Intel-Linux camps will
clash is the market for the back-end systems used to run studio
databases or swap images. Right now, the artists, the film's director
and the relevant studio executives often live in different cities. To
get approval on a final scene, the studios have to fly people around the
country. Morgan Freeman, for example, lives on an island, but is
actively involved in Rendezvous with Rama, a coming science-fiction
film, said Gibbs. 

Intel is working to improve collaborative systems so that complex scenes
can be viewed on standard notebooks. Currently, these back-end systems
run on Unix-RISC computers. 

The Pixar deal comes amid a spate of shuttle diplomacy taking place
between Intel and Apple Computer. Both Pixar and Apple share the same
CEO, Steve Jobs. At Macworld in January, Intel President Paul Otellini
sat in the front row for Steve Jobs' keynote as a VIP guest of Apple.
Jobs also gave Otellini a tour of the show floor. 

Later in January, Jobs delivered the morning keynote address at Intel's
annual sales conference in Las Vegas. "Andy (Grove) always tries to
bring someone in from the outside," said an Intel representative. "Andy
has always thought of Steve as being a quite a creative force in the
industry." 

The Intel chairman and Apple's CEO are, in fact, old friends. Still,
"I'm sure one of the reasons he did it was for the shock value," the
representative said.