Recycling old pc's...for video

[keba]

Hello everyone,
This is my first post on anandtech.

I just finished reading an article related to low cost distributed computing.

http://stonesoup.esd.ornl.gov/

My question is :Can we hook up PC's together to make a powerful graphics processing unit.?

i hope someone can point me to the right direction.I do quite a bit of electronics DIY ....and a little bit of programming as well...so is this possible?

The thought is to use relatively old pc's (anywhere between 400Mc to 1Gc).

and if u want an extra 5 fps,just go ahead and throw in another node.scalable like.....

kentuckybala

 

[RemyCanad]

Part of it will depend on the rendering software and what it supports...

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Well, basically a cluster is what you're talking about but then a cluster is a highly technical thing set up especially for one thing. I doubt that you can do shared graphics in real time with multiple PCs. All I know is that you either have two gfx cards in one PC for real time stuff, or, for rendering, you can split the jobs over a network, but that's not real time.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Since frames tend to depend on each other in processing, I wouldn't think video processing would distribute all that well - not if the goal is 'real-time' output, at any rate; the bandwidth even over Gb ethernet is way too slow!

If you wanted to distribute video procdessing or encoding, which could be broken into segments, then maybe it would be feasible (i.e. if you wanted to distribute a job which you planned tio use later) but I think the bandwidth limitation would severly cripple any attempt to use a cluster for this purppose in real time.

 

[ProviaFan]

This isn't quite what you're looking for, but there's always Distributed Multihead X if you want a wall of displays without numerous expensive quad-head video cards.

 

[GLeeM]

Do you mean something like Pixar does?

I read somewhere they use a bunch of computers.

Folding@Home simulates proteins folding frame (WU) by frame (WU). I think some of them are 1 ns long.

 

[RemyCanad]

I was thinking he ment he needed a "render farm". So he would create the scene and animations in something such as maya. Then we would ofload the rendering tasks to the distributed network. So each machine could work on one frame each and things such as that.

 

[keba]

The intent was to use it as a graphics card for playing games.Im not thinking about rendering stuff later.
Ya i understand the distributed implications.seems like a lot of new learning.

Thanks for your replies

 

[RemyCanad]

If that is the case then no distributed computing will not do anything for you. The responce times of nodes would never reach what you need. Also games would not know how to work with your distributed network. As you read more on it, it should become clear the the interconnection speed is and always will be too slow.

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Originally posted by: RemyCanad it should become clear the the interconnection speed is and always will be too slow.

Well, I doubt the "always". Think of computers that use light as a medium for transmitting data. That should actually do the job for response times good enough for "distributed gaming".

 

[RemyCanad]

Well my theory is that the interconnection speed inside the computer will be always faster than outside. I am sure at some point we will have interconnection speeds that would be fast enough for our computers now but there is no interface to teh computer that could handle it! Also the latency would really mess with the timing.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: RemyCanad
Well my theory is that the interconnection speed inside the computer will be always faster than outside. I am sure at some point we will have interconnection speeds that would be fast enough for our computers now but there is no interface to teh computer that could handle it! Also the latency would really mess with the timing.

What about the high end SGIs? They have some pretty freakin fast interconnects, and I bet the latency isn't too bad, either. Of course, the US$1M+ pricetag is not easy to swallow, and it's kind of hard to run most games off the shelf on Linux/Itanium or IRIX/MIPS.

 

[RemyCanad]

Hehehe I doubt many games would run off of the SGI system.

The SGI systems are not really a cluster are they?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: RemyCanad
Hehehe I doubt many games would run off of the SGI system.

The SGI systems are not really a cluster are they?

In the one I'm thinking about, the CPUs and local memory are in rackmount units, which are connected together by this high-speed interconnect. To the OS, I think the whole system appears as one with many processors, so I suppose it doesn't qualify as a "cluster" by our definition, even though it's broken up into many different boxes. Now, I don't profess to know anything about SGI systems other than what the average person can find on the web, so take this with a grain of salt.