Weta Digital's Render Farm Upgrade

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.

Comments

Name Change

[man_ls]

Isn't the Intel processor called Xeon not XeNon?

I think there's an extra N in there---but I'm not sure.

Re:CPU vs data transmission speeds.

[eyepeepackets]

As the other reply says, plus:

Magnetic RAM is coming soon (MRAM) and holographic memory storage too. Granted, bus speed is still a pain, but if you put enough RAM in the machine and use RAM disks, you can get some serious transfer speeds.

What I want is multiple CPUs per CPU. Yes, I know that sounds strange. Maybe those FPGA thingys will get faster and cheaper soon.