It was a very busy July and August around here, with lots of behind-the-scenes changes/improvements/upgrades. We moved datacenters to consolidate all front-end and back-end systems to one physical location. We implemented a large consolidated storage system to hold job data and enable us to grow our node count rapidly if needed. We have designed and constructed version 2.5 of our custom cooling system. We’ve implemented numerous tweaks to our agents to enable them to transfer data faster and as reliably as possible. The big news, though, is…
We just doubled our CPU count.
That means our Power Levels get access to up to twice the number of CPU’s that they previously used. A 10 Power job submitted in August or earlier will now generally complete in half the time. We’ve already seen several scenarios where our farm is completing results faster than our client Internet connections can retrieve them. The lowest Power levels get a small bump in CPU count, but everything from about 2.5 and up has up to twice the CPU’s available to it.
The farm has been quite busy over the last two months, thanks to all of our wonderful customers. To say we’ve been a victim of our own success is at least partially true. With the doubling of CPU power and the massive storage problems solved, we are positioned to grow more rapidly than before. We hope you will find these improvements worthwhile and beneficial. Thanks to all of you for using Pixel Plow!
-Render Endlessly
