Linux Used To Make "Star Trek, Nemesis"

Mike McCune writes "The "Linux Journal" has a nice article about the switch from Irix to Linux at Digital Domain and the use of Linux in 'Star Trek, Nemesis.' I guess this means that Linux is finally ready for 'The Enterprise.'"

yet another movie using a linux cluster....

[wuchang]

maybe you guys should post articles on movies that don't do their CGI with a Linux cluster (along with their cost of production).

Borg

[frozencesium]

At least MS didn't assimilate them...

seriously though...the switching to linux by bigger and more mainstream companies has always been a topic arround here. the comments will come about how linux "is finaly making it". i guess people ARE starting to realize that there are some benifits not paying the SGI premium prices to do awesome 3d rendering, compositing, rotoscoping, etc. don't get my wrong, i love sgi hardware...but i hate the price.

-frozen

Re:Ho hum, whatever....

[jimmy_dean]

If they switched from Windows- or Mac-based machines, then this would be legit. Other than that it's meaningless in the sense of Linux is Taking Over.

Mac OS X is more Unix than Linux is...Linux is only a clone of Unix functionality and style. But jump forward in time to today and Linux is very much doing its one thing - blazing new trails in speed, stability, and of course acceptance of a free OS in the enterprise sector of business.

This isn't where SGI/IRIX shines

[mikael]

Moving a renderfarm to a Linux cluster isn't surprising. Since rendering is an "Embarrassingly parallel" computation and AMD/Intel has more FLOPS/$ compared to the MIPS processors, this is expected. When you need to pass a lot of data between processors, you'll need one of those Origin 3000 [sgi.com] servers with 1000 processors. Linux can't do this yet.

What is interesting though, is that they moved the workstation applications from SGI to Linux. I didn't know that the SGI hardware was lagging behind that much.

Re:Data...

[Anonymous Coward]

My idiot friend recently installed RH 8 and jumped on IRC with a client rinning from root. It gave him the verbatim "Running IRC from root is stupid" message, and he wouldn't shut up about it for the next few weeks: "Linux called me stupid"

Those wacky Windows people.

Re:This isn't where SGI/IRIX shines

[nomadlogic]

i work for a video effects company in new york. IMHO it's not that the SGI's are that much behind in processing speed it's the cost of one of there systems. a complete Octane2 can run you around $50K to even $100K+ for our highend systems. when you are doing 3D animation with Maya or XSI or something most people have to make the decision between getting a balls out intel system versus a SGI Octane2. now the Octane2 is most likely superior than the intel machine in a design sense(those things are built like a tank!), but you have to ask do you need all of the features that the Octane2 offers to do 3D animation? in our case, most rendeing is done on the farm anyway so no not really.

we use the intel machines, and soon OSX machines, for the artists to work and model on. we use the Octane2 to do the heavy real-time compositing stuff using flame, inferno etc.

false false false! stop spreading this myth!

[Ender Ryan]

Mac OS X is not "more Unix than Linux", not by any stretch of the imagination. OS X is based on BSD, which no longer incorporates any code derived from original Unices. Therefore, they are both "clones". Mac OS X is a registered Unix, ie. they paid to be able to call it Unix. Linux probably meets the single unix specification more closely than OS X, but no one has paid to have Linux certified as a Unix.

Re:Ho hum, whatever....

[Phroggy]

Maybe the CLI environment is more UNIX than Linux is, but the kernel is Mach, the GUI is Quartz, and the APIs are Carbon and Cocoa.

That said, being able to type "crontab -e" and having it open in BBEdit is pretty amazing. ;-)