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Pixar's Render Farm

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Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#211

Post by berkut »

KaiserPro wrote: post #172
aprdm wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, did you move outside VFX and if yes to what industry, have you been enjoying and what motivated you? Cheers

I spent tenish years in VFX. I moved away in 2014, because the hours and pay were abysmal. I still love the industry. I moved to a large profitable financial news paper, which had cute scaling issues (ie they were all solved, so engineers tried to find new and interesting ways to unsolved them ) I then moved to a startup that made self building machine readable maps, which allowed me to play with scale again, but on…

Were you at The Foundry (I think I know who you are)? If so, I think we were both there at the same time!

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#212

Post by cubano »

lsb wrote: post #162
lmilcin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never supposed to support conversation in the first place. People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.

"You are using our product wrong" is never the hallmark of a successful product manager.

Even though I know I must be violating like half the conversational bylaws here on HN I gotta throw in...

"It's not a bug, it's a feature" I've heard since the late 80's and still works magic if you ask me.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#213

Post by cubano »

lattalayta wrote: post #110
ArtWomb wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice to have an industry insider perspective on here ;) Can you speak to any competitive advantages a vfx-centric gpu cloud provider may have over commodity AWS? Even the RenderMan XPU looks to be OSL / Intel AVX-512 SIMD based. Thanks! Supercharging Pixar's RenderMan XPU™ with Intel® AVX-512 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WqrP50nvN4

One potential difference is that the input data required to render a single frame of a high end animated or VFX movie might be several hundred gigabytes (even terabytes for heavy water simulations or hair) - caches, textures, geometry, animation & simulation data, scene description. Often times a VFX centric cloud provider will have some robust system in place for uploading and caching out data across the many nodes…

Did you really just say that one frame can be in the TB range??

Didn't you guys get the memo from B. Gates that no one will ever need more than 640k?

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#214

Post by jfindley »

mroche wrote: post #122
banana_giraffe wrote: post #95

One of the things they mentioned briefly in a little documentary on the making of Soul is that all of the animators work on fairly dumb terminals connected to a back end instance. I can appreciate that working well when people are in the office, but I'm amazed that worked out for them when people moved to work from home. I have trouble getting some of my engineers to have a stable connection stable enough for VS Code…

The entire studio is VDI based (except for the Mac stations, unsure about Windows), utilizing the Teradici PCoIP protocol, 10Zig zero-clients, and (at the time, not sure if they've started testing the graphical agent), Teradici host cards for the workstations. I was an intern in Pixar systems for 2019 (at Blue Sky now), and we're also using a mix of PCoIP and NoMachine for home users. We finally figured out a quirk w…

Few years ago I spoke to some ILM people about their VDI setup, which at the time was cobbled together out of mesos and a bunch of xorg hacks to get VDI server scheduling working on a pool of remote machines with GPUs (I think they might even have used AWS intially but not sure - this is going back a fair few years now). I was doing a lot of work with mesos at the time, and we chatted a bit about this as our work overlapped a fair bit.

Are you still using a similar sort of setup to orchestrate the backend of this, and if so have you published anything about it? I've had a few people ask me about this sort of problem lately and there aren't too many great resources out there I can point people new to this sort of tech towards.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#215

Post by egypturnash »

naikrovek wrote: post #50
happytoexplain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. All I saw was a post with zero context, followed by a reply, followed by another reply using a different reply delineator (a horizontal break instead of a vertical line??), followed by nothing. It just ends. It's hard to believe this is real and intended.

It's amazing to me that people find twitter difficult to read... I mean it's not perfect but it's not an ovaltine decoder ring, either. Just ... Scroll ... Down ... Click where it says "read more" or "show more replies" You're human; THE most adaptable creature known. Adapt! I'm not saying that twitter UX is perfect, or even good. I AM saying that it is usable.

Dude I use Twitter regularly and this thread was super annoying, it just showed me two of the actual tweets that are supposed to be interesting here even after I clicked on “more”.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#216

Post by kortilla »

naikrovek wrote: post #191
turminal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one am saying Twitter has many, many people working on UX and the web interface is still terrible. Hardly any interface made for such a broad spectrum of people gets it just right for all its users, but Twitter is doing an exceptionally bad job at it.

I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically. Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large dif…

> I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates.

This website is full of employees (and ex employees) of Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Twitter, and any other company that has done stuff at global scale.

Scaling provides constraints, we all understand that. The interface being completely miserable to use is not because of that constraint.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#217

Post by turminal »

naikrovek wrote: post #191
turminal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one am saying Twitter has many, many people working on UX and the web interface is still terrible. Hardly any interface made for such a broad spectrum of people gets it just right for all its users, but Twitter is doing an exceptionally bad job at it.

I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically. Yes, their UI sucks. No, they haven't fixed it. I would not be surprised at all if that were due to necessity rather than incompetence. Even tiny changes at that scale make large dif…

> I don't think you (or anyone else on this website) understand the scale at which twitter operates. Including all replies to a thread by default on a site with that amount of traffic will increase the load of ... everything. Dramatically.

I understand fetching all the replies all the time is next to impossible, that's not what I was criticizing, I get the impression that Twitter is doing a good job performance wise anyway.

> And, honestly I would not be surprised if it were incompetence, either. The skill of the silicon valley developer (as demonstrated by the commenters here) does not impress me even a little.

I think incompetence is part of it, but not the only reason. Twitter probably wants its mobile users to interact through the native iOS/Android apps. It's not as obvious as with what Reddit is doing but making the website act flaky and a bit unpleasant to use is certainly a way to get more people to use the app.

I imagine the app looks and feels better. I never used it and I don't intend to, for unrelated reasons. But then I guess I don't really have a right to complain.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#218

Post by folkrav »

nikolay wrote: post #96
lmilcin wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was never supposed to support conversation in the first place. People were supposed to shoot short, simple, single messages and other people maybe react to this with their own short, single messages.

Yeah, I've never seen any value in Twitter. They should've called it "Public IM" or limited IIRC and make it function well like IM. Even the poor implementation of threads in Slack is way better than the perverted version of Twitter.

Apart from being stuck to a single level in depth (which IMHO kind of makes sense in the context of an IM platform), what's that bad about Slack's threads?

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#219

Post by chubot »

nikolay wrote: post #47
hadrien01 wrote: post #10

For those that can't stand Twitter's UI: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1345146328058269696.html

It's very painful to follow a conversation on Twitter. I'm not sure why they think the way they've done things makes sense.

I think they A/B'd some UI and found that the confusing UI gets more clicks. Users are clicking around randomly trying to find context for the conversation, and that's "engagement".

I'm pretty sure the context isn't there in many cases, although I haven't figured out the rules exactly.

Re: Pixar's Render Farm

#220

Post by mathattack »

theptip wrote: post #23
mathattack wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the end it’s still more profitable to hire performance engineers than hardware. For the last decade I’ve heard the “toss more HW” argument. It hasn’t held because the amount of compute and storage goes up too.

In reality it’s never as simple as a single soundbite. If you are a startup with $1k/mo AWS bills, throwing more hardware at the problem can be orders of magnitude cheaper. If you are running resource-intensive workloads then at some point efficiency work becomes ROI-positive. The reason the rule of thumb is to throw more hardware at the problem is that most (good) engineers bias towards wanting to make things perfor…

Yes - context matters. This article is about Pixar where it pays to have someone think about performance. My data points are only companies of 50 people and higher - in those cases cloud consumption was the number 2 cost line item behind people. It matters there. In most cases the people who know cost performance tend to be good at fighting latency - you need the same skills.

This may not apply on smaller side projects or places where technology is secondary.

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