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Weta Digital's Render Farm Upgrade

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the never-before-have-I-wanted-to-lick-a-wall dept.

Headspace2 writes "Weta Digital (The graphics company behing LOtR computer effects) has just purchased 220 2.2GHz dual Xenon machines, each with 4GB of ram, to add to their current render wall of 350 1 Ghz P3 systems. They have also placed an order for another 256 Xenon servers. And it's all running Linux. My favorite quote is 'it is thought the server farm will be the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere'. They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere' Congrats the guys that get to play with all those clock cycles. Make more movies.

2 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. *sigh* by ottffssent · · Score: 5, Informative

    Xenon is an element. Xeon is an expensive CPU. I see "Intel Xenon" too many times at work. Please not on Slashdot too.

    --
    High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
  2. Re:CPU vs data transmission speeds. by Qrlx · · Score: 5, Informative

    Maybe you haven't noticed, but bus speeds have increased since you bought that Pentium 75 system. Though not as much as cpu speed, because that's historically been the focus of the, uh, personal computer. Who cares about optimizing network transactions on a PC? They were built to get away from mainframes, remember? Well, that was true 20 years ago and the paradigm has stuck for longer than it should have.

    Even so, Consumer hard drives can now claim ATA-133 speeds, that's probably an order of magnitude faster than the 1.2 GB drives from five years ago. And SerialATA is coming. On the server side, I think U320 SCSI is out now. SCSI started at 5, now it's at 320. THat's like 64 times faster.

    RAM has kept up, too. The first DIMMS were 66MHz, now you can get effectively 400MHZ DDR, or faster than that if you want soon-to-be-out-of-business RAMBUS.

    Heck they invented the AGP port so we could play games, and that's at 4X now, with 8X on the horizon and some really bigtime advances in GPU power in just the past two years.

    None of these have seen the speed increases of the CPU, but they are moving along at a nice clip. The PCI bus is maybe the weakest link here, but it's gotten better.

    I think there's a lot of room for growth left in the current physical materials. I keep hearing 15 years until we hit the quantum barrier in CPUs, if we keep up with Moore's Law. There was a great article not so long ago about hard drives, and how they are basically doubling in areal storage density every year. In ten years, you can get a 120 Terabyte drive. Only one problem: What the hell would you put on it to fill it up?

    Kinda like the predicament they find with broadband. There's nothing else to do with all that bandwidth than download mp3s and pr0n and warez. Oops.