Does PIXAR just release this sort of information, or is somebody an insider?
kayvonf
Your professor's day job happens to involve research in computer graphics.
grose
What exactly does "required footprint" mean?
oulgen
In case anyone is interested here is Pixar's graphics libraries. (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/) It also includes some explanations about how they implement certain graphical features for their movies.
Faust
@grose. Not positive, but I believe this is basically saying that there will be more overhead and communication costs. For example, as we add processors, they might work very well on large data sets, but for very small data sets, they will actually run slower that less processors. Thus, I think the footprint here is the overhead and communication cost requirements for these extra processors.
kayvonf
@oulen: "Required footprint" refers to the DRAM footprint of renderer. If the scene does not fit in memory, and instead triggers paging to disk, the performance of the rendering computation can drop significantly. As a result, many scenes are designed to that the visible region of the scene is likely to fit in memory on the computers in the render farm.
Also, as you've seen in class, many parallel algorithms duplicate data to make parallelism easier to implement (e.g., avoid dependencies). As such the footprint of the renderer often increases with the number of threads used to perform the rendering. As a result, buying a machine with more cores typically means more memory is needed in the box as well.
Does PIXAR just release this sort of information, or is somebody an insider?
Your professor's day job happens to involve research in computer graphics.
What exactly does "required footprint" mean?
In case anyone is interested here is Pixar's graphics libraries. (http://graphics.pixar.com/library/) It also includes some explanations about how they implement certain graphical features for their movies.
@grose. Not positive, but I believe this is basically saying that there will be more overhead and communication costs. For example, as we add processors, they might work very well on large data sets, but for very small data sets, they will actually run slower that less processors. Thus, I think the footprint here is the overhead and communication cost requirements for these extra processors.
@oulen: "Required footprint" refers to the DRAM footprint of renderer. If the scene does not fit in memory, and instead triggers paging to disk, the performance of the rendering computation can drop significantly. As a result, many scenes are designed to that the visible region of the scene is likely to fit in memory on the computers in the render farm.
Also, as you've seen in class, many parallel algorithms duplicate data to make parallelism easier to implement (e.g., avoid dependencies). As such the footprint of the renderer often increases with the number of threads used to perform the rendering. As a result, buying a machine with more cores typically means more memory is needed in the box as well.