A reader of my recent story on Pixar announcing that its popular RenderMan Pro Server software would start to support Windows clusters questioned why I hadn't noted whether or not RenderMan already ran on Mac and Linux server clusters, known as 'render farms' in the animation biz.

It wasn't intentional, as you can see by Pixar's press release, which is (deliberately?) vague on the matter (it says it supports Linux and Mac OS X, but that's it).

There were few contacts on Pixar's site, which isn't surprising, being a Steve Jobs-founded company now owned by another fairly secretive corporation, Disney. And information on the Web was hard, at least for me, to initially find, though I was able to confirm that Pixar and most other major animation studios had moved from Unix-based render farms to Linux ones about 5 years ago. (Check out Linuxmovies.org for even more information on this topic.)

Eventually, I was able to find a source very familiar with RenderMan to confirm, yes, indeed, the Pixar software can run on both Linux and Mac OS X clusters.

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