Not a very smart thing to do. The employee must have known he was basically stealing resources, and yet the harvest from a few servers doing CPU mining would be miniscule, probably costing more in electricity than could be recovered by trading the proceeds. A $50 graphics card could have likely done a lot better, and no risk involved. Baffling behaviour.
ABC Australia produces content for the several TV stations they run, so it's not impossible he was using a GPU render farm which would have produced a very attractive return.
Both can be used. CUDA is not that different from OpenCL.
Your underlying question seems to be "is it best to use ATI or NVidia cards for a render farm", I don't know the answer to that. Probably depends on the specific rendering software used.
My point is more does a render farm necessarily need to be one of those options? Actually I thought render farms were exclusively used by large 3d only productions rather than simple broadcasting networks that mostly deal in normal video? What kind of GPU based operations would such an organisation benefit from that they would need an in house permanent render farm?
Hm I guess for high-resolution image/video manipulation, compositing videos, rendering intermediate 3d animations/effects, and such. But you're right they won't need more than a small render "farm". They don't need to render Pixar movies...
I'd be interested to know for sure if the guy was actually running GPU or CPU based miners, but I suspect he probably was just running a CPU miner on everything he could get his hands on and hoping the return on the inefficient approach could be overcome by volume. Likely now he'll lose his source of income and get a lesson on risk v reward.
