Have you looked into qLogic and their 10Gbe or Infiniband products. While the
cost is significant I think it is reasonable to be able to setup a 24 port
infiniband render network for $12-14k including a switch, cables, and 24
adapters (note: these adapters require 8x PCIe on all nodes and servers).

Additionally, we are running all i7 or Dual Quad Opterons, each with over 4Gb of
ram/physical processor, and we render/slice PNG significantly faster than Targa.
Personally, I have found a significant processing bottleneck at 2Gb or less per
physical processor, and not much gain (for what I have tested) above 4Gb.

Also, Since we are currenly using GbOC, I would like to figure out tweaks (like
bridged connections, multiple switches, better GbOC switches for large
compressed files) to inprove large compressed file transfer speeds. Anyone with
real experience here. Sadly, if it costs much more than a $1-3k, I would find
funding to go Infiniband.

Thanks.
Pb.

--- In fulldome@yahoogroups.com, "Paul Bourke" <paul.bourke@...> wrote:
> > Curios why you don't incorporate a compositing package such as after
> > effects or similar into your pipeline instead of the premiere/finalcut
> > as this can do 8k in theory and it has a great proxy system

> The proxy system in FCP is OK also.

> The only reason for not using something like AfterEffects for this production
was existing inexperience with it ... and no licenses and no certainty it would
scale to 8K. Note this exercise had a short time scale, intended only as a demo
for the 8K capable planetarium in Hong Kong.

> It would be useful for future productions if it could be confirmed by an
AfterEffects user that 8K is indeed supported. Indeed a list of packages that
can scale up to 8K would be useful, with the tendency of many to use the GPU for
image processing there seems to be increasing limits based upon texture sizes on
graphics cards, many of which are still 4K.

> > I'm interested in how faster network links to storage clouds can help
> > speed up workflow. As we have several people working on shots it is
> > imperative to have a centralised storage area. We use RAID6 arrays
> > attached to a decent server machine with a few gigabit connections.
> > Workflow wise this is great but speed i/o wise you don't get the
> > benefits of the fast raid although with multiple users con-current
> > access to the same storage area becomes an issue especially if you are
> > network rendering comps and really hammering the server but i'd love to
> > hear from anyone running fibre connections or iSCSI type stuff?

> Certainly, as everyone in the HPC (High Performance Computing) game realise,
it is very easy to saturate bandwidth to disk. The very reason why many/most HPC
choose parallel filesystems (eg: Lustre).