>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? 
>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who 
>> worship POV-Ray...!
> 
> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/

"Price: Ask a salesman."

So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> 
> "Price: Ask a salesman."
> 
> So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x
> 

On that level, there ain't much salesmen to ask from. But I'd guess the 
price is defined by what the machine actually will be, where it'll be 
and how good coffees you offer to the salesman.

But darn, that should be capable of counting (512 pcs of dualcore 
Itaniums, mmmm...).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
    http://www.zbxt.net
       aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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On Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:15:23 +0100, Orchid XP v8 wrote:

>>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it??
>>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who
>>> worship POV-Ray...!
>> 
>> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/
> 
> "Price: Ask a salesman."
> 
> So... the price depends on who you ask? x_x

No, but pricing isn't always a simple thing with a complex setup.

Jim

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On 15-Jul-08 21:05, Eero Ahonen wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>
>> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? 
>> O_O This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who 
>> worship POV-Ray...!
>>
> 
> http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/4000/
> 
I might have posted this before, but the Mark Potse in this press 
release: 
http://www.sgi.com/company_info/newsroom/press_releases/2008/january/udm.html 
was a PhD student of mine and when he is in the Netherlands we share a 
room at work.

I did try to find a way to get SGI interested in getting POV compiled on 
that Altix, I did not succeed yet. Perhaps I try again, this time with 
the pretext that in a meeting in Munich next year I will organize a 
track on Art and Scientific Visualization. BTW anyone working in science 
here is invited to join that, I will do a formal announcement when I 
have more details.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Yeah, I know. But you'd be surprised what some crazy nutters try to mod
> their C64s to do... ;-)
> 

And you'd be surprised how much money some crazy nutters spend on computers
just to run distributed computing projects. I know somebody who bought a
PS3 just to run www.ps3grid.net on it.

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I think in general most "supercomputers" only achieve peak performance 
> for very specific kinds of workload. Just grabbing the POV-Ray source 
> code and throwing it at a C compiler is *highly* unlikely to just happen 
> to produce the right kind of workload.


That's one of the reasons the really big ones are custom designed for 
the job they'll be running.

Sure, you could just network a bunch of Linux PCs in a Beowulf cluster, 
or you could spec out the actual CPU speeds, RAM and network bandwidth 
necessary to achieve optimum load on all components.

The first option is cheap, but you might have a very fast CPU sitting 
and waiting for network traffic.  Or, conversly, you could have a 
network that's never fully utilized.  Or you might end up running out of 
RAM.

The second option is expensive, but ensures that everything you buy is 
something you need, and that it will be fully utilized.

...Chambers

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> ...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
> This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
> POV-Ray...!

Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to raytrace in 
realtime at full HD resolution.  That's 27 processor cores.  I wonder how 
fast it would be if someone ported POV to the PS3?

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scott wrote:

> Saw a demo a while back where some dude had hooked up 3 PS3's to 
> raytrace in realtime at full HD resolution.  That's 27 processor cores.  
> I wonder how fast it would be if someone ported POV to the PS3?

Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer 
weight of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?

Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield some 
interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the program to 
take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite fast...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
> performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer weight 
> of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?

There's a nice article on Wikipedia about the processor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

> Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield some 
> interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the program to 
> take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite fast...

The problem is still floating point precision on the GPU - wait until they 
get double precision throughout the pipeline and we'll begin to see some 
interesting stuff.  Also, as Warp always mentions, realistic multi-level 
reflections and refractions are not simple at all (compared to the basic 
"environment mapping" that almost every game uses).

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scott wrote:
>> Mmm, I'm seeing *a lot* of references to the PS3 in relation to high 
>> performance computing. I know nothing about it, but from the sheer 
>> weight of references, I'm guessing it's moderately well-equipted?
> 
> There's a nice article on Wikipedia about the processor
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_processor

Yeah, I'm reading about it now. (Hmm, I guess I'm not the only person 
who still thinks 512 MB RAM is a lot. ;-)

>> Actually, just porting POV-Ray to run on a GPU would probably yield 
>> some interesting speedups. You'd have to radically restructure the 
>> program to take advantage of the way GPUs work, but it should be quite 
>> fast...
> 
> The problem is still floating point precision on the GPU - wait until 
> they get double precision throughout the pipeline and we'll begin to see 
> some interesting stuff.

nVidia GeForce 200 series is ment to offer double-precision when driven 
using CUDA...

> Also, as Warp always mentions, realistic 
> multi-level reflections and refractions are not simple at all (compared 
> to the basic "environment mapping" that almost every game uses).

It's a completely different algorithm to be sure. The mathematics is 
simple enough - it's figuring out how to make it efficient on real-world 
hardware that's the hard part. ;-)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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