what systems/OS do they use in military and hollywood?

CyberGhost

i have 3.0 ghz system with RDRam and 9700pro, and it takes about 10 mins to render a scene of couple of seconds in 3dsmax, i wonder how many days do they need to render those very very complex movie scenes on their machines, do they use intels and amds at all? or is it something else? and what os do they use? i bet not windows, nobody would risk to use it, image rendering something for a week and coming next morning just to find out that there was an illegal operation and you have click reset, that would be a disaster! i heard somewhere they used freeBSD for matrix, never heard of that os

what about military? what do they use? i was once on BBC UK army in Iraq had Inspiron 8200

jonhate

Sometimes people build dummy machines network them and have loads of pcs doing the work....Each doing a different aspect of the renedering process.

I dont know what OS they use....it depends on what the software package runs on I suppose.

John Player

i think shrek and shrek 2 were made on HP machines using linux

l3rian

http://www.military-computers.com/WLU.jpg

Thats a military Radar Control System runing what looks like windows


http://www.bes.co.il/AMC800.htm

The specs of that Airborne mission PC computers built for F-16 and helicopter environment are kind of low, maybe its an old site

Sir Random

I think most movies use VAX or Silicon Graphics O2 machines to render 3D scenes. As for OS, I don't think they'd need anything as sophisticated as DOS since the rendering software would probably be the only software running and would only need basic input/output and some sort of file handling.

A 3GHz PC might be useful to keep the coffee warm & check email

Kali

Pixar:

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 RackSaver. In all, the blade system contains 1,024 Intel 2.8GHz Xeon processors, and it runs the open-source Linux operating system.

Weta Digital (LOTR)..

The render wall at Weta is to take about 800 servers. 350 of these are 1 GHz PIII machines. The remaining 450 are dual processor 2.2 GHz Zeons with 4 GB memory. They run RedHat 7.3.

joc_06

Originally posted by CyberGhost
i heard somewhere they used freeBSD for matrix, never heard of that os

Dunno about military but the matrix 1 was indeed processed (or whteever the term is) with freebsd. It stands for free berkley software division unix and was developed in mit years ago. It's just another unix and i reckon anything from sun to linux can do the same job. I'm pretty sure that they had a couple a hundred pc's networked together processing in parallel rather than 1 stand alone.

Matt Simis

Originally posted by Sir Random
I think most movies use VAX or Silicon Graphics O2 machines to render 3D scenes. As for OS, I don't think they'd need anything as sophisticated as DOS since the rendering software would probably be the only software running and would only need basic input/output and some sort of file handling.

A 3GHz PC might be useful to keep the coffee warm & check email

Vax was last decade, I presume you mean its successor, Alpha? Alphas were used for Titanic and many other films, OS of choice would usually be Tru64 (DEC 64Bit UNIX). Expect to see Opterons and Xeons (god fobid) replacing the traditional "server" systems these days.



Matt

Gerry

Eh, the berkeley in bsd stands for berkeley. University of California Berkeley. Its quite a distance from MIT. If you don't know about the differences between linux, freebsd, and solaris, why bother mentioning them? Also, fair play for reckoning that one pc rendering the matrix just wouldn't cut it.

Virus_Inc

I know Pixar used a distributed rendering system called renderman - have seen the plugin for 3DMax..

whosurpaddy

Originally posted by Gerry
Eh, the berkeley in bsd stands for berkeley. University of California Berkeley. Its quite a distance from MIT. If you don't know about the differences between linux, freebsd, and solaris, why bother mentioning them? Also, fair play for reckoning that one pc rendering the matrix just wouldn't cut it.

em if you look at what he wrote he said it was berkley

Gerry

whosurpaddy, can you even read?

Dunno about military but the matrix 1 was indeed processed (or whteever the term is) with freebsd. It stands for free berkley software division unix and was developed in mit years ago.

Maybe I should have said "the b in bsd stands for berkeley", and then my post would have made more sense. But joc_06's post said it was developed in MIT, maybe you need some bold tags to spot that.

Red Alert

SGI's were used a lot but i think when they decided to put IRIX on the back burner and tried selling NT systems, their user base dried up.

po0k

For processing you're going to need farm of nodes as fast, powerful (these are two distinguished terms, fast != powerful in some cases) and with enough memory to do the job without overflowing.
CGI is easily segmentable.
this is key when using clusters.
You must be able to easily divide the whole job into small portions for each slave node to process and return to the master for compilation into the finished product.
Rendering each frame/scene in a equence fits the bill well here, just push each block of data for each frame out to each node and let them crunch away.
To transfer all these chunks of data around you need to link the nodes together with as fast and low-latency a connection as possible, say 1000/100Base-FX, FibreChannel or that other Ethernet alternative supplied by a company with "My...." or something in their name, can't remeber it exactly.
Aside from the individual link speed, you'll need switching kit with enough backplane bandwidth to shift all the data round the place, with as low a latency as possble from each node, ideally, with all nodes experienceing the same latency to aid synchronisation - although this may be moot as not every scene will take the same time to render.
As for OS anything but a *n*x OS or custom OS is a non-runner. it'll more than liekly be *n*x cos that's what most systems desginers/vendors will be experienced in/be pushing.
An extension of clustering is Grid Computing. I highly suggest you look it up.
try http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ for more.
Also, aside from rendering the raw polygons, textures, NURBS etc. for each scene, you also have to light it correctly.
And Gerry's right re: correcting joc_06.
The actual hardware in each node will generally be decided by 1. whether it can actually do what you want 2. whether you're system tech dudes have an affinity for certain tech and 3. how much processing power you can get for your Hollywood $s/how fast you need to get it done, regardless of cost.

po0k

RE: Military tech
For field purposes it's usually current public-sector tech, just clocked back to ensure it's as reliabel as possible, tweaked here and there for specific purposes.
Generally not much more power then what it's meatnt to do, and built to last.
Hence why there are avionics refits every few years on jets.
Of course, I'm excluding the Super-Dooper-XXX-Sekrit-Military-Industrial-Complex-The-Truth-Is-Out-There-Scully-Hi-Tech-Smart-Rabbit-Electron technology they only show off out at the biggest fireworks displays.
That filters down to consumer level in about 7-10 years.
Then Terrorists/Guerillas use it to better effect.
GSM mobile phones


....like that piece of shite B-2

Capt'n Midnight

Military use of PC has caused problems - they got infected by viruses in the Gulf. But thats just laptops using std packages rather than "real" military equipment.

The embedded systems - radar -avionics etc. would be specially designed to the extent that even the CPU's would be specially designed. Also have a look at the fly by wire used on civilian aircraft - many are using 80186 (ie. not a 286/386/486 or pentuim) simply because consumer systems are too complex to prove they would be reiliable and precicatble in all conditions. eg: before the pentuim bug there were heat related multiply problems with 386.

nadir

Yea, right on syxpak, no better man to end a flame, it solid top notch jargon.
I think guys like industrial magic who are using linux "last i heard" would build like several differnet machines basically to cut the rendering time down as opposed to doing it all on one machine, which wouldnt be very reliable or whatever. But those machines are er kinda loads of hardware just all networked, so like the equivalent is the CPU are racks where they will have lets say 14 kick ass processors all in what i think syxpak was reffering to as a 'node' so basically like a motherboard just for cpus, we used to have **** like that at work in a sun place i was working in, so just throw 14 sparc chips in this (whats basically and array) board. and then use ur main networking to wire them all up with fibre or what not. Then they will have storage areas, like mabe scsi raid setup, for storing the main data (this would be equivalent to like the cache in a normal computer. and then from then it will go to the hard storage with would be like ur hard disk, so like tape or other rom storage. I guess its the same idea as a normal pc just bigger .
The os then would be like a very bassic linux setup, just all the libs necessary, a renderer and a seriously hacked kernel. Whcih is basically what scilicon graphics do. But there are loads of sites on the web about that kinda stuff im sure u can google it

As for military, im not sure, i know that they have a habit of writing custom stuff, like for security and all. Its funny tho the USS yorktown ran win nt before, and it crashed leaving it stuck somewhere in the pacific:
Go on Microsoft!!

El_MUERkO

I read on the register a good while back about the US military using an adapted Linux OS for alot of new tech stuff like automated radar early warning systems, it was free and cut down on development costs.

davil

Nah yiz are all wrong - sure the matrix was thought up in the late 70s and has been rendering on a C64 ever since. Or so I read in some thread here on boards methinks. Sounds about right to me. poke 53280,0: poke 53281,5 - that was the first line of code in rendering the matrix that was. :P

zAbbo

sigh

davil

Oh well sorry for not being up to your high standards of Comedy, your majesty.

po0k

Originally posted by Capt'n Midnight
Military use of PC has caused problems - they got infected by viruses in the Gulf. But thats just laptops using std packages rather than "real" military equipment.

The embedded systems - radar -avionics etc. would be specially designed to the extent that even the CPU's would be specially designed. Also have a look at the fly by wire used on civilian aircraft - many are using 80186 (ie. not a 286/386/486 or pentuim) simply because consumer systems are too complex to prove they would be reiliable and precicatble in all conditions. eg: before the pentuim bug there were heat related multiply problems with 386.

I can tell you they use stuff a hell of a lot more powerful then that.
Take the control systems for rudder, ailerons, flaps etc.
The feedback systems need to be very smooth and very accurate to ensure stable flight.
The avionics need to be able to process a huge amount of information (ATC, radar, comms, general plane housekeeping systems etc.) in real-time.
Most of the tech will be ASICs designed and tested by the avionics manufacturers (that's why avionics are only updated every few years, it takes that long to design, implement and test new ASIC designs).
They could use FPGAs but the gains in turnaround would be lost in performance or cost in large batch numbers.

cerebus

Originally posted by SyxPak
RE: Military tech
For field purposes it's usually current public-sector tech, just clocked back to ensure it's as reliabel as possible, tweaked here and there for specific purposes.
Generally not much more power then what it's meatnt to do, and built to last.

Just an aside:

This could end up being a problem for the military - IEEE Spectrum had an article about microwave weapons recently (November issue). Lots of the digital systems purchased off-the-shelf by the US military are incredibly vulnerable to electromagnetic damage. Wireless networking makes things even worse, as all of a sudden the compute and communications systems have antennas, giving an electromagnetic pulse easy access to the very thin FET oxides you find in modern silicon devices.

The US Navy no longer requires that all its hardware be hardened - they decided it was too costly and slowed down the integration of new technology. Here's hoping they never find themselves exposed to the kind of pulse a nuclear weapon would generate...

Bring back valves, that's what I say

Originally posted by SyxPak
(that's why avionics are only updated every few years, it takes that long to design, implement and test new ASIC designs).

In fairness, it all depends on the design methodology - I've seen some places where they can bring a new design from feasibility to production release in less than 12 months. (And yes, I've seen others where it takes several years and multiple spins/revs to get a design to production )

Nice to see you recognize the importance of test - usually much more than 50% of the design effort.

Capt'n Midnight

Airbus using 80186's aand 68000's
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/21.96.html
Sidestick roll commands are input into five computers: two Elevator and
Aileron Computers (ELACs) and three Spoiler and Elevator Computers (SECs).
Each of these boxes is "dual channel", with two processors, one hot and the
other shadowing the first. Each ELAC contains a pair of MC68000 series
processors with dissimilar software; each SEC a pair of Intel 80186's with
dissimilar software. ... A diagram and explanation can be found on
pp. 133-4 of Cary R. Spitzer, Digital Avionics Systems: Principles and
Practice, Second edition, McGraw-Hill, 1993.
See also http://yarchive.net/air/airliners/a320.html

An example of Specialised CPU's for the military.
http://www.ttivanguard.com/dublin/dspdeath.pdf
Intel invested considerable money and effort in the design of the 80960MX microprocessor, for which, at the time of implementation, the only known application was the YF-22 aircraft. When the only prototype of the YF-22 crashed, the application volume for the ’960MX actually went to zero, but even if the program had been successful, Intel could not have expected to sell more than a few thousand processors for that application.

Capt'n Midnight

http://digilander.libero.it/unno2/navighiamo/DOS.txt
Gossip: There are rumors that Microsoft has produced a special version of MS-DOS for the U.S. goverment and military, called MS-DOS 6.23. U.S. armed forces members have reported seeing original installation disks for MS-DOS 6.23 and claim that they use MS-DOS 6.23 on their computers.

vibe666

i know the first few series of Babylon 5 (:rolleyes: OK, i know it's old news, but...) were all rendered on amiga's.

just to make sure was correct, i dug this up from HERE:

The B5 effects teams, both at Foundation and at NDI, use Lightwave 3D by NewTek and specialized software to design and render the visual effects. For the pilot, the effects were rendered on a network of Amiga computers; later, Foundation used 12 Pentium PCs and 5 DEC Alpha workstations for 3D rendering and design, and 3 Macintoshes for piecing together on-set computer displays.

dubhthach

Originally posted by Sir Random
I think most movies use VAX or Silicon Graphics O2 machines to render 3D scenes.

O2's were designed as cheap workstations that you could use at home more so then at work, the animation studies tended to use SGI Octanes particulary ones with the dual cpu module installed.

I've got an octane myself
dual 250mhz R10000 1GB RAM, 18GB Scsi disk


These days Linux has taken over alot of spots for basic workstation use, you'll still get SGI though esp. for the more high-end stuff

For the actual rendering well that's mostly moved on to linux renderfarms, i know pixar use to use clusterd SGI Origin 2000's but they gone over to Linux nearly fully.