Following on from yesterday‘s post about the size insanity of these new AI machine clusters, I went looking for a picture of the render farm we had at JHCS. I knew I had one somewhere. I eventually found it in an old slide deck I put together documenting the render pipeline. The resolution is terrible because I think I must have been using my Motorolla V3‘s camera, which was the best we had at the time. It wasn‘t on my old Flickr account, I think this pre-dates a lot of those web 2.0 websites, or at least my usage of them. The slide deck was in my Gmail!
My memory that it was 200 nodes might be inaccurate, looks like about 100 pizza box style Boxx nodes there in the machine room, though I think maybe we added a couple of racks at some point. I remember it was tricky fitting them all in the tiny machine room. But at night time, the farm grew to include all the artists machines in the building, so perhaps 200 nodes is about right after all. We called the machines, which I think were all running Fedora Linux, the Doozers, named after the creatures in Fraggle Rock. #