Building Your Own Super Computer
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Why pay $10 million for a supercomputer when Ahm can show you how to build your own supercomputer cluster with just a handful of Windows/Linux PC's...
James Cameron’s Titanic (the movie) special effects crew couldn't afford a supercomputer to do the critical rendering, and anything less would take far too long.
Like all high-end animators and special effects houses, the Titanic team had a slew of SGI Indigo workstations (as well as a pile of new Windows NT workstations for the low end jobs), but Titanic romance and tragedy was far more demanding than most projects.
A much greater degree of realism was required than for the typical science fiction epic, and realism is expensive. Rendering the water scenes was obviously a job for a supercomputer, but with Titanic already far over budget, a $10,000,000 computer wasn't realistic.
The performance problem was solved by assembling a cluster of DEC Alpha based computers into a Linux cluster, an instant supercomputer at a small fraction of the cost, which produced a large number of extraordinarily challenging visual effects for this demanding film.
In this article, although a bit off topic, I will discuss how to build a generic Linux or Windows supercomputer with the clustered computing concept. You will find out just how easy it is to build a supercomputer with Linux clusters. In this article we will limit our discussion to building Linux and Windows clusters to obtain supercomputer computational power. It is out of scope of this article to discuss how to solve any computational intensive algorithmic problem and how to code those algorithms for cluster architecture.
Next: Definitions and Benefits of Clustering >>
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