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Pixar's Render Farm

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382 points brundolf | 1 comments | 02 Jan 21 19:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.201s | source
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nom ◴[02 Jan 21 20:39 UTC] No.25616292[source]▶
Oh man, I wanted this to contain much more details :(

Whats the hardware? How much electric energy goes into rendering a frame or a whole movie? How do they provision it (as they keep #cores fixed)? They only talk about cores, do they even use GPUs? What's running on the machines? What did they optimize lately?

So many questions! Maybe someone from Pixar's systems department is reading this :)?

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1. lattalayta ◴[02 Jan 21 22:22 UTC] No.25617126[source]▶
Also, renderfarms are usually referred to "in cores", because it's usually heterogeneous hardware networked together over the years. You may have some brand new 96 core 512 GB RAM machines mixed in with some several year old 8 core 32 GB machines. When a technical artist is submitting their work to be rendered on the farm, they often have an idea of how expensive their task will be. They will request a certain number of cores from the farm and a scheduler will go through and try to optimize everyone's requests across the available machines.