Hi All,
I am presently building a duel 2.4ghtz xeon 6 core machine to run Houdini. So I am wondering if anyone had any thoughts / problems they have encountered with the various linux flavours available and the compatibility of the various intel cpu tech to run Houdini.

Rob

Hey Rob,

I just recently built a workstation for Houdini. I'm using Ubuntu 11.04. Here are the specs:

2x Intel Xeon Processor X5650 (2660 MHz, 1MB/12MB);
4x Kingston DIMM 4 GB PC3-8500 ECC Reg.;
ZOTAC GeForce GTX 580 AMP2 mit 3072 MB GDDR5-RAM;
1x 500 GB Western Digital RE4 (64 MB/7200 UPM/S-ATA II);
60 GB OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (2,5", 50.000 IOPS, MLC, S-ATA II);

Other than the fact that I should probably upgrade to 24 GB of RAM everything runs like a charm and Mantra screams on this machine
I've been using the latest Mac Pro before and have to say that Houdini runs much smoother on Ubuntu than on Mac OS X (haven't tried Lion).

I took me a little bit of time to setup everything correctly and get everything working like i wanted (like my Wacom), but right now I'm having zero problems.

Something that's weird though is the fact that Mantra sometimes seems to not utilize the Hyperthreading Technologie very well and maxes only 12 of the 24 virtual cores. But that happens just in special cases and seems to be dependent on your scene, shaders and render engine.

HTH

-dennis

Hi Dennis,
good to hear !. Are you sure the hyper threading issue is not OS related.

Rob

As for distribution, I just went through a few of them and ended up with Linux Mint. I think it's essentially Ubuntu without the new Gnome3, which I found a little bit too adventurous for my taste..

I experienced the HT behaviour with Mac OS X as well as Ubuntu 11.04 so it's not an Ubuntu issue. Haven't tested it with Windows though.

I also tried Linux Mint which is available in an Ubuntu and a Debian Flavour. I liked it very much but in my opinion Ubuntu 11.04 had a better “runs out of the box” feeling to it.

-dennis

eetu
As for distribution, I just went through a few of them and ended up with Linux Mint. I think it's essentially Ubuntu without the new Gnome3, which I found a little bit too adventurous for my taste..

Same here. Houdini runs like a charm on Mint and you dont get the dreaded Unity or Gnome3.

@Dennis: What mainboard do You use ?

dennis.weil
I experienced the HT behaviour with Mac OS X as well as Ubuntu 11.04 so it's not an Ubuntu issue. Haven't tested it with Windows though.

I also tried Linux Mint which is available in an Ubuntu and a Debian Flavour. I liked it very much but in my opinion Ubuntu 11.04 had a better “runs out of the box” feeling to it.

-dennis

sanostol
@Dennis: What mainboard do You use ?

Right now I'm using a Tyan S7010AGM2NRF mainboard. I've experienced this also on my Mac Pro which should have a completely different custom mainboard so I don't think this should be the problem.
Like I said it only happens in rare cases with special scenes and is not a general issue. I would be interested however if someone else experienced something similar.

-dennis

thanks Dennis.
I'm will build a quite similar setup, cool to hear everything works fine. I'm considering this mainboard by tyan S7025AGM2NR.

Martin

PS: greetings from Munich

Going through different linux distrubutions and versions, ubuntu and mint.
using ubuntu 10.04 so far, have new machinnes i7-3960X LGA2011 Socket with GTX 580 3Gb. had som problem with ubuntu 10.04 drivers for LGA2011 Socket and netcard. liked the look of mint 12 but had small problem with portable quadro card.

which mint version are you using? testing mint 10 at the moment seems ok so far after the normal icon problem..

any more suggestion for testing centos? is there any distributions that are significant faster than the rest, would be intresting to know what the big studios using. will use it for hodudini 11 and 12.

hodrop
any more suggestion for testing centos? is there any distributions that are significant faster than the rest, would be intresting to know what the big studios using. will use it for hodudini 11 and 12.

Many studios here in Stockholm use Fedora with Gnome 2 or XFCE.
for example.. Important Looking Pirates, Milford, MadCrew

my workstation specs:

2x Intel Xeon X5670
Kingston ValueRAM - 24 GB (4gb modules)
ASUS Z8NA-D6 Motherboard
2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor 300GB (RAID 1)
Nvidia Quadro 4000

running Fedora 16 XFCE spin

Hi, I have a

2 * xeon 5670
48gb dominator corsair ddr3
motherboard evga classified sr-2

A vertex 3 ssd as hard drive for linux
(a revodrive 3 X2 for windows)

My distrib of linux is centOS 6.2 and everything works fine.
Sometimes all cores are not working but it's really rare and i don't know why.

There's an average (for me) of 15% of time gain for linux against widnows 7

i´d love to find out how good the AMD Opteron 6282 SE are.
And you can have 4 of these bad boys on one motherboard!

From all tests i have reed online they are good. even better the currently best Xeons.

Imagine a 64 core workstation!

I wanted one dual xeon also!
but went with 3960X and 64 gb ram, fx580 3gb and one portable
Quadro FX 3000M, Core i7-2820QM,16GB RAM

runing dual boot win 7 and ubuntu 10.04 on both and everything works fine,

CL is of ourse muhch faster on fx580, but its good to have a nice laptop also to do tests whenever you like.

maybe looking into fedora later, AMD Opteron 6282 SE looks intresting.

very interesting. I'm currently selling my mac pro and plan on building a dual boot linux distro / windows machine. I'll be using Houdini on linux. Should I go radeon or quadro for the graphics card? Also I was looking into the xeon E5 eight cores. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks

..using Houdini on linux. Should I go radeon..

You will die screaming, if you try this.
Go Nvidia.

protozoan

..using Houdini on linux. Should I go radeon..

You will die screaming, if you try this.
Go Nvidia.

Figured that lol. Just thought I'd ask nonetheless. Is it worth dishing out the money to get a workstation card? Or just go with the gtx 500 600 series card?

kjmitch

protozoan

..using Houdini on linux. Should I go radeon..

You will die screaming, if you try this.
Go Nvidia.

Figured that lol. Just thought I'd ask nonetheless. Is it worth dishing out the money to get a workstation card? Or just go with the gtx 500 600 series card?

From what i have read on the forums the gtx 580 will work better then a Quadro 4000. More brute force speed. And for the price a much better choice.

kwejk

kjmitch

protozoan

..using Houdini on linux. Should I go radeon..

You will die screaming, if you try this.
Go Nvidia.

Figured that lol. Just thought I'd ask nonetheless. Is it worth dishing out the money to get a workstation card? Or just go with the gtx 500 600 series card?

From what i have read on the forums the gtx 580 will work better then a Quadro 4000. More brute force speed. And for the price a much better choice.

Thanks. I think I have the majority of my new build mapped out.