[rescue] What Linux can run on Sun Fire V890 (UltraSparc IV+) server

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Nov 25, 2009 at 09:54:33PM +0200, gsm at mendelson.com wrote:

> The other thing that I have been wondering following all of this, is are
> the programs he plans to run multithreaded? Video compression is not
> AFAIK something that can be done in parallel, so if you figure one cpu for
> video and one cpu for audio and the operating system, what do you do with
> the rest of them?

Video processing can be parallel.  Right off the bat, You can have one
thread for IO, one thread for decompression, and one thread for
compression.  Beyond that, other areas that could be easily threaded (I
believe) would be motion estimation on the encoder, and the DCT and iDCT
stages on the encoder and decoder, as well as color space conversion (if
needed).  As far as I know it has only been recently that this level of
threading would be reasonable, so I'm not aware of all that many
programs that both to do more than simply pipeline a few stages, like
IO, encode, and decode into a very small number of not evenly balanced
threads. 

I believe that blender rendering is supposed to scale well over multiple
CPUs.  I don't know about the physics or the rest of blender though.  

In ffmpeg, threading is supported in theory, but how well depends on the
input and output codecs.  For instannce, h264 will use thread for decode
only IF the file has multiple slices, and I believe that many codecs
don't support threading.