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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.

4 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Is one day too much to ask.... by Rebel+Patriot · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ...without a front-page type or two? Xenon machines, FotR... I understand typos happen everywhere, but when you're putting out a product like slashdot.org, even asking people for money for ad-free browsing, you would think you could expect some basic editing of the stories. Is it that much to ask to have some one read over the story once or twice before it's posted?

    Out of 10 or 12 stories a day, there are always one or two with bad grammar and/or spelling. This definately takes away from any sense of professionalism slashdot.org presents on itself. Consider this editors, everyday this website is your best resume`. You wouldn't submit a resume` that has grammatical errors on it, would you?

    --
    Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
  2. Great marketing idea! by DearSlashdot · · Score: 5, Interesting
    They should use that in the FotR ad campaign... 'Rendered using the most powerful processing site in the southern hemisphere.'

    Sure, who cares about plot or character development? We've got a server farm!

    Who submitted this? George Lucas?

    --

    "Why should we leave America to go to America Junior?" - H. Simpson, on visiting Canada
  3. Make more movies? by Milinar · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Maybe, maybe not. It's my impression that studios like this put tremendous amounts of capital into individual projects. They may very well not do another movie after the third LotR. Case in point: digital domain hired over 1000(!) animators to work on titanic - just imagine the amount of hardware they got. I could be wrong, but they haven't done a project nearly like that since.

    Plus, with moore's law, those machines they bought won't be worth the electric bill in a few years.
    -Milinar

  4. what graphics? opengl? by horster · · Score: 2, Interesting

    do these render farms use any graphics chips or are they done entirely in cpu?
    the reason I ask is that linux does not have any high quality open source opengl that supports the latest graphics boards. nvidia is probably the best for opengl support but not opensource.