36 Cores, 72 Threads, and Two Titan Xs - Our New INSANE Rendering Machine Part 3
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,020 words · ~15 min read
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so this is exciting we are finally going to be validating if our idea for the
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rendering machine over there is going to work but first we need a long Ethernet
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cable
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so freshbooks is the online invoicing
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solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster click on
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this bought right here for a free trial
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now um all right so one of the few
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pieces of the puzzle still well there's a few pieces of the puzzle still missing
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okay one of the pieces of the puzzle still missing is getting a 10 GB
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Ethernet connection to that machine so we've swapped out to the super micro
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board that doesn't have it on board but the good news is oh I just dropped one
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okay well the good news is my x540s and
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other 10 gbit cards are here now so
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we're going to go ahead and get that puppy linked up then we have to actually
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build the machine I've just had it in a test bench up till now
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so and this this was the thinking behind
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the carabiners in the
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ceiling okay
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so now in
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theory we are 10
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gbit sick all right we are good
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so let's let's actually let's actually build this machine
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finally finally okay so I thought that
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this RPC
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4224 was actually going to be one for to grow into but it looks like we need it
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now so this is the last of my four U cases from Norco that they graciously
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provided for our new server room and we are going to be using this one for the
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rendering machine so there's all of our mounting
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Hardwares there's our nice soft foam
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that my cat would eat if he could get at it and he would try to swallow it and he
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would then get it stuck in his stomach which he did again costing me another
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$1,200 if he does it again I'm going to kill him that's twice in 4 months he's
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eating foam and needed
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surgery so there point is it cheaper to
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just get a new cat it would have been cheaper to get two new cats the first
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time now I could have had three new cats and like a pretty cool
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lizard all right
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but he's my baby and I love him that's
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what I tell myself it's like gee why doesn't lonus have a Lambo with all that
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YouTube money cuz he has the world's most expensive cat that's why
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okay um I'm going to need a minute to clear some space here I
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think um band machine
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gun um
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power supply now I could leave the 860i that I
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have in there but then if I ever want to
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actually put graphics cards in cuz I'm going to take those graphics cards out
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if I ever wanted to put proper graphics cards in then I would have to replace it
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with something else which is kind of a pain in the
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butt so H you know what no I'm going to
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stick with the 860 ey the odds of
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throwing graphics cards in here are pretty
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slim do you know how long it's been since I've seen a motherboard where I
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actually have to pop the covers on the io plate off
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myself like are you for
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real YOLO man
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oh that's really tight okay I need
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pliers okay just doing a quick test fit here finding out where the devil all the
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holes are so that one over there and this one
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right here what okay so there's that
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one there's that one there's that one
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where's this
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one do you need all of them well it's
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optimal get away with two I think that's what I
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do um this show is all about the uh right
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way to do things
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so so at least
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three I guess we'll need a power supply at some
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point okay then oh look at that there's fits
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over at the front here it's perfect just like Christmas kind of a week Christmas a fan
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header yeah your expectations are so
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high how did you know that I wasn't going to do fan headers for Christmas
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bonuses this year now my feelings are hurt they should be now that my feelings
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are hurt maybe there will be no Christmas bonus did you ever think of that bet you'd rather have a fan header
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than nothing no I think I'd rather nothing than fan headers just because
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that's kind of insulting
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duly noted Merry Christmas everyone here
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poop oh you don't like poop oh you want poop
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nothing I think everyone in the comments will agree with me that fan headers are
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better than poop that doesn't even make sense at
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least you could use poop for what
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leaving on your boss's desk for giving youan bosses give you
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poop I actually ordered a game with uh little turds and velcro helmets that you
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wear that they stick to on Amazon that I
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was thinking we'd play on Channel Super Fun so it occurs to me now I need a
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graphics card I didn't really want to
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put one in here but this motherboard has no onboard
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graphics and you're sure you can't use a Titan so I'm thinking as I install the
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power supply this is the one piece of Hardware in this machine that I would
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really like to change um not because the
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860 watt isn't enough for for what we're going to do and that may be the case in
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the future if we find some kind of application that can take advantage of
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GPU which is why I wanted a motherboard in the first place that would support
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multiple gpus but the reason I would like to have a different power supply in
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here is actually more to do with redundancy um but finding a a mini
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redundant so that's what they're called a mini redundant power supply one in
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this form factor of sufficient wattage for this system with a couple of high
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power gpus actually not not easy um there was
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a 600 watt there may be something higher than that feel free to leave a message
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in the comments if you guys can can find something better than that but uh yeah
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I'm pretty much stuck with a single
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non-redundant power supply the good news is this is a very reliable power supply
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and this machine won't actually be storing anything Mission critical data
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goes onto another server gets ripped off of it and then transcoded over to
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another server by this one it never actually actually touches the data so um
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it should be fine it's just I would rather I would rather it was actually
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redundant and it'll be on a UPS as well so the power supply would have to fail
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to take it down even temporarily I guess it's all right all
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right in theory this boots now any time
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hey all right okay so here we are here's
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our 72 CPU threads only half of which are
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actual cores weak sauce I know and this my
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friends is the reason for some of the
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confusion around this particular system had a lot of people asking things like
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why do you need so many CPU cores to which I replied nothing because
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I wasn't really ready to talk about what the solution was yet the reason we need
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so many CPU corses we're going to be using it for transcoding and then doing
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the final outputs of our videos to make
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our videos easier to work on on our workstations without leg as we're
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scrubbing through the timeline and to make our exports more seamless of the
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finished videos and hopefully faster question number two
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lonus what aren't you running Linux on a
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server it's a server to which my reply
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is well gee I guess if you'd maybe asked
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what software we were using I might have been able to reply that the software
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we're using doesn't run on Linux and in
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fact there isn't a Linux version so
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we're going to be using soron squeeze server and how this works is pretty much
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it's that's not server this isn't server well where's server we are going going
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to be using Sorenson squeeze server and
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the way that works is we pretty much have a watch folder that we drop files
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into and it transcodes them for us so we
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uh had to do a fair bit of experimentation by we I mean Ed who's
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behind the camera had to do a fair bit of experimentation to find out exactly
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how much we could get out of our 36 CPU
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cores and if we did would it even do anything positive for our workflow so
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the exact workflow is not 100% finalized
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yet but what we do know is that if we use ENC code and watch folders and we
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set ourselves up a watch folder and a destination when we ingest footage off
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of our cards which will be over Thunderbolt so we'll actually be able to
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ingest very quickly even off multiple cards automatically our watch folder is
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going to take those and apply a particular preset to them so we can take
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a big whack of footage which we've actually got on the local disc here and
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then we are going to copy here and this
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will do two things so number one it will
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take the footage off of our SD cards which we would cut paste instead of copy
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pasting and then number two now that it's safely on our storage array it will
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take these and transcode them to a different easier to work with format and
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then boot them out somewhere else so in this case we are using another local
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folder which oops I just paused that which may end up being a bottleneck but
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we'll we'll do a quick experiment before this video is over to find out if our 10
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GB network is going to benefit us here what we're waiting for now as the files
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copy is we've set up our watch folder to monitor itself every 1 minute and then
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start processing so we can have a look at our current jobs nothing has happened
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yet but we'll know soon enough because our CPU is going to start going bananas
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here oh here we go here we go I think something's happening
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5% 7% CPU let's see if the uh the job is
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showing up yep there we go so you can see it's taking all these clips and
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importing them then transcoding them then it does something else and there's
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a lot of there's a lot of waiting involved but uh our CPU usage should
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start to slowly ramp up as more of them
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get past the importing stage and make it to the encoding stage excuse me
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transcoding which I guess is also encoding
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76 oh it's going up to 85% oh now it's
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working well what the Sam heck I guess
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it just takes a while to get all fired up or something look at it go we're
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actually getting a fairly reasonable turbo frequency out of this whole
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process like 2.7 plus GHz right now so
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there's actually a couple of different views we can get of this it looks like
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cpu0 is getting most of the love but we can actually change it to look at the
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two different num noes and you can see that CPU Z's utilization is higher but
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it's not that much uh well it is quite a
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bit higher so it is significantly higher than uh than node one and then we can
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also change the graph to overall utilization so you can see as it
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climbs really high CPU one kind of catches up to zero
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but it is it is sign significantly
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lower none of these jobs are finished they're all at the importing or
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transcoding stage still he's very interesting okay so
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we're only seeing like Max highest peak 70% CPU utilization and we realized that
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the last time we validated any of this it was actually in this server with one
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of the processors plugged into the motherboard
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so maybe the advantage that this one has
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has over the one we're using now is much much faster storage so if we can connect
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to this one over the network then we should be able to leverage that storage
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in theory so let's fire up the 24s SD server and see if uh using that as a
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Target helps 1 Gigabyte per second over the
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network and what's interesting about being able to see network utilization
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here is that unlike local dis utilization
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uh we we know where the hard cap is and
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it gives us a really clear idea of how much CPU utilization corresponds to how
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much Network utilization you can see network is actually not even changing in
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spite of the fact that CPU's gone from 13 to
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45% but what remains to be seen is whether our CPU usage will go higher
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than it was able to before with less of a storage bottleneck so like so many of
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our videos this one ends up actually raising more questions then it answers
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but hopefully we were at least able to answer the question of why we wanted
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such a high-powered server it's to enable a smoother workflow when multiple
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people are hitting the files at the same time and uh in order to have an easy
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quick way to replicate our data as soon as we ingest it onto our server so we
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can avoid the current workflow which is
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just leave it on the SD card just in case cuz there's only one copy on the
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server this way we'll actually have a copy on on one server and a copy on
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another one as soon as we've ingested the footage and it has gone through this
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transcoding process okay so we're back at
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the the current office for now but that doesn't mean I'm not going to take an
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opportunity to tell you guys about our sponsor today here and that is h e re
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not h e a r in spite of the fact that these things go in your ears is a pretty
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unique little campaign that's up on Kickstarter right now now to be clear
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these are not earbuds they're not uh a
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Bluetooth handset they're not any of those things what they are is they're a
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real world real time uh sort of audio
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effects applicator so you can adjust the
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volume of the real world you can change EQ settings of the real world you can go
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ahead and you know like say for example you're at a concert and you're like you
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know what this could use some Reverb you whip up the app on your phone and if all
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goes according to plan you'll be able to add add like a concert hall sound to
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that dude in the cubicle next to you if you so desire or you could do more
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useful things with it for example like tuning out a baby on an airplane or even
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the engine noise on an airplane simply by making adjustments through the app
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they're quoting a 6-hour battery life and it comes with a charging case that
16:46
holds an additional two charges so over the course of your day I'm sure you'll
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come up with a lot of interesting effects application things to do to it
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now you might be asking yourself okay well hold on a second what about the latency they're quoting 30 micros
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between the microphone on the outside and the speaker on the inside taking
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noises changing them and then blasting them into your it doesn't have to be
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blasting because there's a volume control and then blasting them into your
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ears for you to hear so if you're curious to learn more or you want to
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support them check out the kickstarter page which is linked in the video
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description thanks for coming along for the ride you guys um if you disliked the
17:25
video I think you know what to do but if you liked it then go ahead and press
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17:43
it thanks again for watching and if you are looking for something else to watch
17:47
after having done all that stuff then go ahead and click the little I in the top
17:51
right corner and check out the video on Channel Super Fun that we did where uh a
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certain Teran van hemert and an electrical vehicle and some Thug Life
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involved I don't think that's how you hold it and you should probably have
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both yeah there you
18:19
go I don't know what I'm doing
18:30
he