XBOX as renderers

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copeland3300

Gawd
Joined
Jan 8, 2003
Messages
640
I was hoping that someone would be able to help me out. I want to turn a few xboxes into some renderers for 3ds max on my network. Any suggestions? I was hoping that I could install windows 2K on to it and then go from there.
 
No go on a Win2k install from what I understand.

You may be able to set them up as Linux renderers.. but even so a 733mhz celeron is not a lot of processing power.

==>Lazn
 
You can hack Win2000 to run on the X-Box, details on the X-Box Linux site (of all places). However, the Xbox is only a Celeron 733 with 64MB of ram, I think you can build a much better rendering system for $150.
 
from current newegg prices
for $200
you can put together a system
with a xp2000
mobo with vid and lan and sound onboard
and 256mb ram
and a chepo 250w powersupply/case combo
and then you can get a 6gb HD off of ebay

will do 4-8x better at rendering than the xbox's
 
Hi i was just wondering what are all of you guys talking about 'clustering'??? Any guides or info?
 
Jason711 said:
i wonder if you could beowolf cluster xboxes....
Click to expand...

Yes. People have even clustered PS2s together for Beowolfs. As to why one would do this, I don't know...
 
Because it's kewl? :p

Anyway, you should do what a lot of the folding@home guys do. Buy several motherboards/cpu/ram, and then just take long threaded rods and stick them through all the motherboards' mounting holes, and use hex nuts to space them out. That way you have a very compact tower of number crunchers, and it just looks damn cool too. Then all you have to hook up is a psu and a network cable to each motherboard, and there you go. The software setup is obviously more complicated, but you get the idea.

Can you netboot without a HD? I wonder.
 
tom61 said:
Yes. People have even clustered PS2s together for Beowolfs. As to why one would do this, I don't know...
Click to expand...

well for one, its almost a given that all the hardware is stable...

which i understand is the chief concern reguarding clusters...
 
v3rt1g0 said:
Can you netboot without a HD? I wonder.
Click to expand...

As long as you have the right mobo's then only one hard drive is needed for the whole stack.
It all depends on Linux driver support for the nic.
If you can get it to install a ram drive over the net then your good to go.

Luck...... :D
u=Tigerbiten.gif
 
Back to the XBox..
You will have to either install a modchip or hack the bios in some other way to be able to install linux and whatnot. You know that, right?
Also, do you already have these few xboxes in your posession? If not, I would go one of the above mentioned routes.
 
Even with standard PCs how would something like that be done? can I say distribute video encoding to 2 computers at once then?
 
Well, the PS2 clusters was made so that the Graphic Synthesizers (GPU's name )could be used in parallel, not the Emotion Engine (PS2 CPU). The Graphic Synths are really strong on vector math (SIMD)

All that, of course, IIRC
 
awdark said:
can I say distribute video encoding to 2 computers at once then?
Click to expand...

Not really, video encoding is highly linear, you can't really be doing stuff ahead of where the encode is at.

Clustering is more for 3D rendering, that can use stuff in parrallel, and for items that can be processed out of order.
 
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