I have a question regarding the conversion farms that people have made, and I would like some insight.

We're going to have some fun creating a four octo-core machine farm to make DCPs out of whatever comes our way, and I was wondering if anyone is using 10GbE for their internal network.

Clearly, 10,000 Base-T is not really necessary for most things.  However, we would like to make sure that the bottleneck is not the network, but I also don't want to have to special order about $3,000 in 10GbE hardware to do this if it is not necessary, so if a 1GbE network is comfortably adequate for the process, I really would look forward to that kind of assurance.  It would cut the current tally back about a third on the build.  On the other hand, if it would be a major benefit, I don't want to take it off the table either.

Now onto the other thing:

NOTE: I'm certainly not pushing.  I was wondering if DCP-o-matic using GPUs for conversion is closer to the front of the minds of Carl and the others.  The reason for this is that I don't intend to buy the video cards for the subordinate servers as, if the software is not going to do this any time soon, using the onboard video will be fine, especially since the machines won't even have monitors, keyboards or mice (we'll use TeamViewer to access the machines if need be).  I remember the discussion where optimistic thoughts were bandied about for a golden future where everything was always exactly the way we wanted it, so I just thought I'd ask.  I mean, the subs will be using linux, and only the master will run Windows (put simply, there are people who are a bit strident regarding the ease for which they expect to use the system, and hey, a single license of Windows is not the expensive part of the build.)

Thanks!

Leslie