Now that it would ever happen, at least by me, but I was wondering if its at least theoretically possible.
There is a high tech firm called Linux NetworkX. They build MSMP machines out of XEON and AthlonXP proccessors. One of their machines installed at Lawrence Livermore Lab is the 4th fastest in the world and runs, get this, 2304 2.4GHZ XEON CPUs, under modified Linux. With peak performance at , hold on now, 11060 Gigaflops. Hows that for render farm. Now if Houdini is installed on it along with 2303 Mental Ray render nodes, it should work right. Theoretically you would run Houdini on one CPU and rest are for rendering. So a 1 minute animation with 1,000,000 polys, 10 GI lights, 160gb of textures, rendering at 2048X1536 into Cineon LOG format would render in few hours. Hows that for meeting deadlines. One wonders what resides in basement of SPIW. LINUX seems to be wave of the future for Intel desktop. Wonder if Microsoft will ship its own version of Linux.

Dave Rindner

Well, I don't know about a massively parrallel machine, but in Houdini you can do network render with whatever machines are available. I haven't tried it with Apprentice, so I don't know it it works, but in the manuals it explains how to do it.

In your ROP, click on the little additional properties button next to the render command. In the standard tab, click on remote hosts, enter all the remote hosts in a comma seperated list and remove your machine. Start a render and you should be able to continue to work with your machine while other machines on the network are rendering. Since Mantra renders buckets, each machine should grab a different bucket of the current frame and render away. It should work with as many mchines as you have licenses for, but I'm not sure it works with Apprentice.

I just built a second machine so I'll install Apprentice and give it a try.

Oh, and there's no way MS would ever ship a version of Linux. Linux is the polar opposite of MS's idea of what computing should be.