Notes on two presentations by Gordon Bell ca. 1998
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From: Gavin Scott on 10 Feb 2010 18:49 Eugene Miya <eugene(a)cse.ucsc.edu> wrote: > The original Lucasfilm numbers for requirements (pixels) were fairly > impressive as well. 16K on a size with 32-bit of color depth including alpha. A one gigabyte frame buffer? What would thay have fed it with? Even today most film stuff is only rendered at 2K. > I would suggest 1 step beyond PC 3D to network 3D. A friend visited > Cameron with Katzenberg (who insisted that he was not a technologist) one day > on the Avatar set. That friend is actually attempting a new venture > attempting to hire interns (cloudpic.com if people are interested). CloudPic looks like wide-area asset management, which is probably useful but not interesting. I'm sure the Avatar production had most of those issues solved considering their world-wide distributed teams. More interesting will be real-time collaboration using the virtual photography and real-time performance capture -> rendered preview stuff that Cameron and company are doing. The Avatar production gives a nice preview of the future, but we're not yet there for portraying human beings. Works awesome for 3m tall blue alien human/animal morphs though (basically standing with one foot on either side of the "uncanny valley"). G.
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 10 Feb 2010 18:58 Robert Myers <rbmyersusa(a)gmail.com> writes: > Even Boeing had to sell time on its Cray to justify it, and the > important thing about a Cray at the time was that it always had > potential customers, unlike the one-off machines of today. Then, as > now, only the government could make silly purchases and not go out of > business. I was undergraudate and responsible for IT stuff at the univ. about the time Boeing Computer Services was being formed ... the univ. datacenter had just gone thru a phase with the state legislature being made an independent entity ... the legislature than had to allocate univ. dept. budgets for different places to "buy" services from the univ. datacenter. the univ. datacenter then was also allowed to sell dataprocessing services to other state agencies and gov. operations. It looked like Boeing was attempting to do something similar with BCS .... turning dataprocessing from a purely overhead expense item into something that looked like P&L (even tho much of it was internal funny money) ... but also allowed to sell dataprocessing services to operations outside of Boeing. I was con'ed into spending spring vacation teaching 40hr class to the BCS technical staff (was only about half dozen people at the time) .... and then was con'ed into becoming a full-time BCS employee for the summer (I got some sort of upper level designation that allowed me to park in one of the nearer lots at boeing field, I was still within first two dozen bcs employees ... possibly even within first dozen bcs employees). BCS was being scaffoled off of corporate hdqtrs administrative dataprocessing ... which had a 360/30 primarily for doing payroll. In theory BCS was going to take over control of the other major dataprocessing ... big datacenter operation down in renton field ... and the new one that went in up at Everett. That summer on visits to renton datacenter ... there were constantly pieces of 360/65s sitting in the hallways outside the datacenter ... 360/65s were arriving faster than they could be installed (possibly eventually 20-30? 360/65s ... between renton and everett). There were all sorts of political discussions about getting head of renton (with dozens of high-end 360s and other computers) to report to corporate hdqtrs guy responsible for 360/30. That summer, they also installed (single processor) 360/67 for running cp67/cms online timesharing in the corporate hdqtrs 360/30 computer room. That summer they also moved the duplex 360/67 from boeing huntsville to seattle boeing aerospace. renton also had at least one 360/75 (did some amount of classified work .... had black cloth that was pulled over the 360/75 front panel lights when running classified work ... also the view windows on the 1403 printers were covered, perimeter of the 360/76 area was also roped off) and i believe (one or more) cdc6600 in the renton datacenter. renton was pegged at having something like $300M in ibm 360s. there was study about business continuity ... something about renton datacenter being in the mudslide path from MT. Rainier. This was used to have a complete replicated operation in Everett ... supposedly if the dataprocessing provided by the renton center was unavailable for a week .... it would cost Boeing more than the complete cost of the datacenter. At the end-of-the-summer ... they did the paper work to have me take employee educational leave of abscence to go back to school. When I finally graduated ... I went with the science center in boston .... rather than returning to boeing. Current Boeing website claims that BCS wasn't officially formed until the following year. http://www.boeing.com/history/narrative/n071boe.html from above: Boeing Computer Services (BCS), an independent subsidiary of the company. Within three years, BCS had six sales offices to market five commercial computer products -- including BCS/Mainstream, a time-sharing computer service used by 148 government and commercial customers. .... snip ... BCS did get some federal contracts. I remember visiting the BCS office (in 70s) in washington (DC) area ... and being shown how they had used cms\apl to do the financial modeling for justifying 1st class postage stamp price increase (contract with usps). -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 10 Feb 2010 19:34 re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2010c.html#89 Notes on two presentations by Gordon Bell ca. 1998 also from the BCS history page (not being officially formed until the following year) In 1970, 13 different computing organizations in Boeing, each supporting different operations within the company, were combined as Boeing Computer Services (BCS), an independent subsidiary of the company. Within three years, BCS had six sales offices to market five commercial computer products -- including BCS/Mainstream, a time-sharing computer service used by 148 government and commercial customers. .... snip ... also in the reference boeing history page ... click "next narrative" and gets http://www.boeing.com/history/narrative/n072boe.html from above: During the 1980s, Boeing Computer Services headquarters were on a 90-acre site in Bellevue, Wash. The organization also served the federal government from a large facility in Vienna, Va. BCS designed, installed and operated a nationwide telecommunications network for NASA and provided voice, data, facsimile and full-motion video across the network using the CRAY X-MP supercomputer. .... snip ... -- 42yrs virtualization experience (since Jan68), online at home since Mar1970
From: Paul Wallich on 10 Feb 2010 20:34 Robert Myers wrote: > On Feb 10, 5:37 pm, Rick Jones <rick.jon...(a)hp.com> wrote: >> Robert Myers <rbmyers...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >>> Andy Glew has said that a supercomputer is nothing but a big, multi- >>> tiered switch. That is certainly what supercomputers have come to >>> be, and I don't want to give the impression that I think even the >>> lame interconnects we get are necessarily trivial. >> Does it even have to be a "supercomputer" to look like a big >> multi-tiered switch? >> > The term supercomputer is now nearly meaningless, so there's no point > in haggling over it. ;-) > >> So, a system near to my paycheck - HP Superdome - a "cell based" (no, >> not *that* cell thank you very much :) system - two processors on an >> FSB with an agent chip that speaks to an interconnect fabric. I >> suspect it would be considered a "real" computer produced by "real" >> architects and developers. (those feeling snarky are encouraged to >> send your snarks in direct email) >> > I'll use your mention of Superdome to return to a subject presumed > dead, which is Itanium: > > http://www.tgdaily.com/networking-brief/48339-intel-itanium-outsells-amd-opteron > > "Intel kicked off its Itanium presentation today by saying the > Itanium's system revenue since the introduction of 2001 has crossed > the $5 billion mark. That outsells total sales of AMD's Opterons." Just a nit, and the original article is just stenography, but isn't there something wrong with comparing the dollar value of boxes containing a chip with the dollar value of a single chip? paul
From: Robert Myers on 10 Feb 2010 21:16
On Feb 10, 8:34 pm, Paul Wallich <p...(a)panix.com> wrote: > > Just a nit, and the original article is just stenography, but isn't > there something wrong with comparing the dollar value of boxes > containing a chip with the dollar value of a single chip? > I wouldn't know how to scrub marketing claims if my life depended on it. If they've got the balls to put the claim out there, I've got the balls to repeat it. Caveat lector. *Someone* doesn't regard Itanium as a dead issue. Robert. |