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Connecting two PowerPC-G5's together
Posted by John Anderson
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Re: Connecting two PowerPC-G5's together February 05, 2009 07:49PM |
FCP does not support network rendering as it renders files rather than frames. Compressor 3 allows for network rendering, and I believe both machines need to be on FCS2 and Leopard (not too sure about Tiger). You can try this out...
[visionstudios.ca]
www.strypesinpost.com
[visionstudios.ca]
www.strypesinpost.com
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Re: Connecting two PowerPC-G5's together February 05, 2009 07:56PM |
What you're describing is called "cluster computing," but it's non-trivial. If you have enough licenses, you can install Compressor on a number of Macs and create a Qmaster cluster out of them, but that's it as far as Final Cut Studio goes.
Some other programs are cluster-aware. The After Effects renderer can be configured to render a single comp across multiple systems. So can many 3D renderers. But programs like this are typically idiosyncratic. They each have their own configuration requirements, and have to be set up differently.
If what you want is just to bolt two Macs together somehow so you can turn them into one larger Mac, well ? you can't. Which is a shame. Silicon Graphics had technology to do just that about a decade ago, letting you connect multiple small systems nodes together into a large, cache-coherent, shared-memory system. I don't know of any other companies that ever explored that path, though. Which is a shame, because systems like that scaled insanely well.
I've often fantasized about a Mac Pro built on the Onyx4 model. The base node is essentially a fat Xserve, with a graphics board and room for a couple-three PCIe boards, and a special socket on the back. Want more processors? Buy another one, and connect them with a cable via the special sockets. When you turn them back on, you now have one Mac Pro with sixteen processor cores. As long as you need more processing power, you can keep buying more nodes and plugging them together to build a bigger and bigger system.
SGI's Origin servers could scale to thousands of processors that way.
Sure, that architecture failed in the commercial market because cluster computing provided an eighty percent solution. Something like that would have only marginal utility in the real world. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome.
(Biggest system I ever had to myself was 40 processors. For a while, before it was integrated into an even larger system, we had it configured as a single-user system. I patched the keyboard and mouse and graphics up to my cubicle from the machine room and used it for two months as my personal workstation. That was hot.)
Some other programs are cluster-aware. The After Effects renderer can be configured to render a single comp across multiple systems. So can many 3D renderers. But programs like this are typically idiosyncratic. They each have their own configuration requirements, and have to be set up differently.
If what you want is just to bolt two Macs together somehow so you can turn them into one larger Mac, well ? you can't. Which is a shame. Silicon Graphics had technology to do just that about a decade ago, letting you connect multiple small systems nodes together into a large, cache-coherent, shared-memory system. I don't know of any other companies that ever explored that path, though. Which is a shame, because systems like that scaled insanely well.
I've often fantasized about a Mac Pro built on the Onyx4 model. The base node is essentially a fat Xserve, with a graphics board and room for a couple-three PCIe boards, and a special socket on the back. Want more processors? Buy another one, and connect them with a cable via the special sockets. When you turn them back on, you now have one Mac Pro with sixteen processor cores. As long as you need more processing power, you can keep buying more nodes and plugging them together to build a bigger and bigger system.
SGI's Origin servers could scale to thousands of processors that way.
Sure, that architecture failed in the commercial market because cluster computing provided an eighty percent solution. Something like that would have only marginal utility in the real world. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome.
(Biggest system I ever had to myself was 40 processors. For a while, before it was integrated into an even larger system, we had it configured as a single-user system. I patched the keyboard and mouse and graphics up to my cubicle from the machine room and used it for two months as my personal workstation. That was hot.)
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