From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-Id: <200305090049.h490ne527735@augusta.math.psu.edu> To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] design clairvoyance & the 9 way In-Reply-To: Your message of "Thu, 08 May 2003 20:12:07 CDT." <3EBB0067.6080903@ameritech.net> From: Dan Cross Date: Thu, 8 May 2003 20:49:40 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: a5808a1c-eacb-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 > It may represent 0% of the market today (check your figures), but, > not in the near future. Besides, I'd rather be flexible enough to > contract out to write the software for the 0% that will pay me > 6 figures per hit, than concentrate on the other 99% of the market > that will may me out 6 figures per year. Pixar was just an > example of what a large group of people are actually becoming > involved in. Think about how many animation groups alone > are beginning to use the same techniques as Pixar. I think Lucas > Light-and-whatever was actually using SMP clusters before > Pixar. That may still be two examples, but, this is what trend > analysis is all about. Looking at who is doing what, then, > determining the most likely group of individuals to follow, and > whether there is a market for it. If you want the biggest bang > for the buck, it seems to me you should be looking towards future > trends, not old ones. You missed my point. There's nothing wrong with asking whether SMP is still relevant. See, that's the thing. The current trends seem to be *away* from SMP machines and towards clusters of single-CPU machines; I remember when The Abyss was made on clusters of multi-processor SGI Iris systems; Toy Story was then made on a cluster of multi-processor SPARCstation 20's; then Titanic was (partially) made on a cluster of single-CPU Alpha's running Linux. Maybe Pixar is using SMP machines because that's where the sweet spot is in terms of price/performance. But it's been that way in the past, and then it's changed. Whatever is happening now doesn't mean it will be that way in two years, or five. In other words, the future trend is likely to be uniprocessor machines connected by a really fast network, not big SMP machines connected by a fast network. See, for instance, the new blade systems being shipped by various vendors. Now, maybe I'm wrong about SMP versus uniprocessor machines, but my real point was that condeming someone for asking a question of relevance isn't a step in the right direction. - Dan C.