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Technology Stocks : Digital Equipment Corp. (DEC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hpeace who wrote (2949)	2/11/1998 6:01:00 PM
From: Anand V	Respond to of 3276

Titanic & Alphas - interesting article: linuxjournal.com /anand ps: Sorry if someone had posted this before. .... "At that point we began running the Titanic work through the "Render Ranch" of Alphas. The first part of this work partition was to simulate and render the water elements. We knew that the water elements were computationally very expensive, so this process was one of the major reasons for purchasing theAlphas. These jobs computed for approximately 45 minutes and then generated several hundred megabytes of image data to be stored on central storage servers. Intermediate data was stored on the local SCSI disk of the Alpha. The floating-point power of the DEC Alpha made jobs run about 3.5 times faster than on our old SGI systems. As the water rendering completed, the task load then switched to compositing. These jobs were more I/O bound, because they had to read elements from disks on servers spread around the facility and combine them into frames to be stored centrally. Even so, we still saw improvements of a factor of two for these tasks. We were extremely pleased with the results. Between the beginning of June and the end of August, the Alpha Linux systems processed over three hundred thousand frames. The systems were up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There were no extended downtimes, and many of the machines were up for more than a month at a time.....