it's the destination...

...not the journey.

admittedly a twist on that old saw.

however, in this instance, it does hold true. the project has now finished (indeed, at the end of last month). in relation to a previous post (april 1st), where i noted that we had two months to get to the finish line, it turned into one month after all the post-black thursday negotiations were done.

as fate would have it, i still had a spreadsheet from the very beginning of this venture which allowed some sort of projection on hardware requirements based on total frame count x projected layer count x reasonable render time per frame.

initially, this spreadsheet had resulted in a farm numbering in the low 40's (not 42 - of course that would have been neat in hindsight and a hitch-hiker's guide to the galaxy sort of way).

we initially ended up with 25, of which one died (strangely enough, unit 13), and one was taken away to be a combination license and job server for our render management software. so that makes 23. and that number stayed until march the 17th.

two months shrunk into one, and the spreadsheet came up with an additional 40 dual-processor machines to add to the current farm to make the deadline. now, during the course of the project, we had been sporadically testing samples of render units from various vendors and we were settled on either an either intel or amd solution.

we'd also tested the dual g5 solution from apple and found it a third slower, so i didn't really consider it a contender.

catch being, with the time (two weeks to obtain and test and setup), only apple's asia retailer had the numbers we needed readily available... ...a point perhaps worthy of some thought.

so we are now the largest installation of dual g5 rack-mount computers outside of biological research facilities.

think projected addition plus a third more, to make up for the per-unit shortfall.

after all is said and done, we finished, we made it. how we got there, the hardware story is above.

the human angle, perhaps others can inscribe.

have to admit that i'm not really looking forward to administering such a host of hostile machines (a triumph of form over function in most all it's respects) - but it's a living, after all. a challenge. a potential heart attack.

(",)

wonder what other turns our hardware future may take.