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Weta Prepares to Render LOTR: ROTK
Dee Arsmith writes "Peter Jackson's special-effects company Weta Digital has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors. Seven racks of IBM blade servers have been added to Weta's existing 15-rack server cluster to make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors. The cluster will be used to render the frames drawn by the animators to complete the final installment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King."
Is this... could this... could this be the mythical Beowulf Cluster talked of in Slashdot posts of yore? Could such a beast truly exist?
ClutterMe.com - easiest site creation on the Net. Just click and type.
Could delay release maybe. Get it right WETA! :)
One rack to cluster 'em,
One rack to render them all,
and in the darkness draw them.
-------
"God, root, what is difference?" - Pitr, userfriendly
Damn. Why can't New Line underwrite my company? Better yet, why can't they underwrite me? I'm sure I could put a couple thousand processors to good use.
And what exactly would I use them for? Why, I'd install Gentoo on them, of course. With those suckers, it'll only take hours rather than days to install KDE!
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
It may be able to render Return of the King but I doubt it will be able to deliver 10 fps for DooM 3. Time to upgrade some more, weta!
I think after the movie they should use this type of processing power for something to help the benefit of society (e.g figure out cancer cures etc..) or to promote open source.. it would sure help.. Distrubted computing DOES work.
If you look at top500.org, you see that the current top Intel-based cluster is #5, the one with 2304 procs in LLNL.
The article says their cluster has 'more than 2000 processors'. So presumably they mean 'more than 2304'?
Can I play Mount Doom on it afterwards? Please, pretty please?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
.. power units, fans, floppy drives, switches ...
floppy drives? They are living in a dream world with pixes, leprechauns and eskimos
There's no free PR/hype to be generated by saying 'ok we're gonna use the same computers we used before'.
Adding more machines makes a big difference... it means that you get to do more takes on a shot.
Adding more horsepower, assuming the file I/O is fast and the machine doesn't swap... its close to being linear.
So a 20% improvement means that you get done 20% faster... or, more likely in the biz, thats 20% more wish-fixes that get done... or... even more likely... that means more complex shots.
-Tim
-I just work here... how am I supposed to know?
Shot here refers to standard movie terminology, that is what is between 2 edit cuts. I mean shots of just the New Zealnd scenery, like some of Rohan, require no VFX. Sure one VFX shot may go through different iterations but in the end it's still one shot.
And yes 1200 is very high. I usually consider anything above 400 VFX shots to be high. The Perfect Storm had less than 400 and Pearl Harbor and Ai had about 200 and they still feel VFX heavy. Asylum VFX, a small but very good boutique shop can only handle about 200 shots per project on average though they grew and upgraded so they could handle 400 for Master and Commander. When the makers even doubled that it was a bit too much for them.
OK /. How far away is a system like this from real-time photorealistic rendering? I've always wondered why somebody didn't throw enough hardware together to render film-quality CG at 30 frames/sec. What are the technical limitations preventing this?
See for instance http://www.wired.com/news/digiwood/0,1412,56778,0
Q: What platforms does Massive run on? A: Massive runs under Linux and Irix.
Many interesting details at http://www.massivesoftware.com/
... one of Weta's biggest problems was the lack of space, which prompted the move to blade servers - slim units containing processors and memory which slide into a separate chassis containing power units, fans, floppy drives, switches and connections to the other servers.
Why not use a cluster of Cappuccinos then? They fit neatly into the previous description, don't they?
See...
1- Cluster of Cappuccinos
2- ?????
3- Time trip to Soviet Russia (where Cappuccinos cluster you)
4- PROFIT!!!
Now seriously, imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!!!
I think I'll go to sleep.
This is not my opinion. Actually, it's not even an opinion. And I'm nowhere to be seen near it
The limit Weta are working against is time. They have a deadline. The faster their render farm, the less likely a problem - realising a scene is wrong, servers crashing, hardware failing - is to cause them to slip.
Likewise, I imagine Weta's biggest expense is staff & contractors. If they have to work nights and weekends to get work done because they're waiting on hardware, that's a big cost, probably a lot bigger than the cost of adding servers to the farm.
Finally, there's the possibility of doing more complex and detailed rendering and compositing with a bigger farm, especially for the extended editions of the DVDs - for example, they're doing a huge amount extra for the Two Towers DVD, since they're adding lots more to the Ents.
Well, they "understand" that the last two movies made huge bank to the tune of more than three times what they cost to make. I don't think they'd have much "understanding of his vision" if they'd tanked.
It all still comes down to the bottom line. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
When I was a boy, we did our rendering calculations by hand. A pencil, lots of paper, and we liked it! These kids today and their fancy calculating machines.... bah, humbug.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
ok, my "render math" isn't the greatest, but I can NOT imagine that the system he had before was THAT bad? What do you really gain by adding that much MORE horsepower? Is that the difference between a frame being rendered in 45sec vs 50sec? I understand that every little bit counts, but a LOT of these movies was done live action. Unless that little Gollum thing is in every scene, why does he need more? (ok, I know, I always want faster, better too....I'm just saying)
Well, when you're talking about a 2.5 minute CGI shot, you have 24 frames/second (minimum) X 60 seconds/minute X 2.5 minutes = 3600 frames to render. 3600 frames X 5 minutes/frame savings = 18000 minutes or 300 hours in total saved by reducing a frame render from 50 minutes to 45.
That's just in 2.5 minutes of on-screen CGI, too - when the lions share of the film requires complex digital effects, the rest is easy to justify to the bean counters. In fact, I'd be suprised if they don't end up with even more horsepower by the time ROTK is in theatres - saving that much time provides big returns on investment.
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
After ROTK gets mastered, there'll be one hell of a lot of processing power laying idle.
"Your conviction was brought to you by WETA Productions, proud suppliers of counter-encryption solutions to the law enforcement community"
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
No, to please the fans this movie will actually be shot on location in the real live Mordor...
WTF?!
The article mentioned that the battle with Shelob was one of the two fights requiring a lot of CGI, which is...interesting. And reminded me of two things:
;-)
1. At my next-to-last job, we had a server named Shelob, complete with a little name sticker on the outside. Now, instead of outside the server, Shelob's going to be inside it.
2. When I talked to Sauron (aka Sala Baker after he accepted the Hugo for The Fellowship of the Rings at last year's worldcon, I asked about Shelob and he assured me that Shelob was going to be "really cool."
3. Of course, I didn't realize at that point that Shelob had been pushed back into The Return of the King; if it hadn't, 2002 would have been a banner year for giant spider films, since Eight Legged Freaks also came out that year. I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire. Which is something of a shame, because I rather like John Clute's theory that the scourging of the Shire represents a diminished recapitulation of Sauron's fall, in the same way Sauron's own fall is a diminished recapitulation of Morgoth's. Oh well...
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
You can select using a button on the front of each blade which of the 14 blades in the BladeCenter chassis has ownership of the 'MediaTray'.
Of course this switching can also be done remotely over Ethernet using the management interface (which also provides power, reset, remote video and much, much more).
From the OS viewpoint the Floppy and CD-ROM drive are USB devices, so switching the MediaTray to another blade server actually causes a USB disconnect/connect.
If you want to see what they look like: http://ibm.com/servers/eserver/bladecenter/
Well if anything you can't fault VFX with the story. But yes each prequel had over 2000 VFX shots. You have to read the article though, last film Weta did about 800 VFX shots and for this they are doing upwards of 1200. As their technology matures (Massive, muscle dynamics, subsurface scattering) you can even throw more things at to the VFX.
It certainly is a big setup, they are adding 1,176 new processors to what they already had (which was stated in an article some time ago). Probably ILM and Imageworks have a bit more though. The article says that they have the largets Intel deployment, but places like ILM and Imageworks, besides their Intel/Linux machine still have quite bit of SGI hardware around. An article on the SGI websitye a couple years back stated ILM had an 800 CPU Origin 2000 machine, and around 500 O2s. Since then a lot of the TDs, animators and compositors have gotten Dell Linux workstations and several of them keep the 2 machines side by side (the O2 and the Dell). ILM and Pixar also recently added to their renderfarm via RackSaver:
Pixar switches from Sun to Intel
Racksaver testimonials
AMD debuts server processor, readies 'Barton'
SGI Powers 5 Summer films
It certainly is nice that New Line is paying for this though. I'm sure other studios are envious ;-).
I understand why they moved the scene, but it makes me think that The Return of the King will probably show very little, if any, of the scourging of the Shire.
How many times does this need to be repeated? In just about every interview with Peter Jackson, cast, and crew since 1999, they have said the Scouring will not be in the movie. It's in the DVD audio commentaries, endless magazine articles, and web postings. They paid homage to it in the Mirror of Galadriel. This has been stated countless times.
For the last time, there will be no Scouring in the Return of the King!
"Sufferin' succotash."
In terms of number of processors, ASCI Red at Sandia has had > 9000 Intel pentium pro (and them pentium II Xeon) procesors since the late 1990s.
It's still # 15 on the top 500 list
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows 95 on my PC, I told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the Windows 95 CD. To my surprise he threw it into my micro-wave oven and turned on the oven. Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.' After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a close look at it.' To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I have ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet remote, as if out of a great depth:
0 E510CC98D444AA08E1324
12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE8209450920F923A40EE1
'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said.
'No but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common English this is what it says:'
One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.
ref
.. considering JRR Tolkien's history with Beowulf.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
I haven't read the books
That's too bad. Amazon.com readers picked these books as the best fiction of the 20th century. To really enjoy the movie you have to know the books.
Does Tolkien ever get around to tying all these loose ends together?
He ties all the loose ends together, and then in the appendices adds in enough backstory to support another 10 books.
Do you think that Jackson can tear himself away from the computerized stuff long enough to actually tell a story in this one?
I don't think that it is possible to tell the LOTR story in less than about 20-30 hours of movies. When I saw that somebody was going to try I shuddered. There is a lot of stuff getting mutilated or left out in these movies.
On the other hand I do not believe that it is possible to do any better on film than Jackson is doing. What he is doing is far beyond what I thought would happen.
Yeah. Here's some summaries of other equally shitty pieces of literature:
Romeo and Juliet: "Romeo and Juliet love each other, but their families hate each other, so they kill themselves."
Les Miserables: "A criminal escapes, and an inspector tries to recapture him."
And one that our readers may be more familiar with, Cryptonomicon: "An internet start-up tries to make it big with help from an employee's dead father."
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
and truly adapting the story to the big screen
Someone who hasn't read the books really has no place offering suggestions to a director about how to adapt a story. Go read the books if you don't understand the movie.
Twelve fingers or one, its how you play. ~Gattaca (Vincent)
Here's my dream for a sequel to TITANIC; it's also a love story, and could also pave the way for an awesome TITANIC 3:
Start like the first movie, panning around underwater, until you find Jack's dead, bloated corpse. Play some heart-rending music, pan around, whatever. Then, just like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, the corpse WAKES UP.
He rises up and starts walking. Then feel free to add whatever adventures or misadventures with sharks, undead pirates, giant squids, whatever, etc., etc. As much fun as that is, it is secondary to our main focus.
However, as the movie goes on, Jack's appearance should get more and more gruesome, with decomposing bits of flesh that fall off or get eaten, barnacles, sea weed, whatever. By the end he should appear to be part zombie, part skeleton, with some debris thrown in for good measure. However, he should also be totally grotesque in appearance, and therefore still be recognizable as Leonardo DiCaprio.
Finally, our (anti-)hero gets close to his goal. He looks up, and sees a ring falling through the water. He grabs the ring, floats/swims upward, looks up at the old woman leaning over and staring down, and says in his best boyish Leo voice "Hey, you dropped this!"
She then has a heart attack, falls into the water, and dies. And they're finally together, forever! Cue triumphant romantic music.
THE END
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Watching the LOTR moview requires some background from the books in order to fully appreciate what is going on in various scenes.
One comparison would be having to stop and explain the concept of god in the movie Bruce Almighty. A large number of people in the U.S.A. are familiar with the concept of god. This means the makers of a movie that have god as a participant would rely on the background people have learned over their lives. They would not need to explain what god is.
In the LOTR movies there is a vast cosmology that in some basic ways differes from our current world. If you know nothing of this cosmology then the movies may or may not be appealing to you based on the limited comprehesion and incorrect assumptions you will make due to you not possessing the needed background information.
IMHO Tolkien was a master story teller by the time he got about halfway through the two towers. The first part of the written story drags a little but once you get further into it it moves quite well. For those who like charactor development the FOTR is great charactor building information.
If you do not like to read the printed page I would recommend getting an unabridged audio tape set of the LOTR and listening to it. You could borrow such a set from a library without too much searching. www.recordedbooks.com has an unabridged reading of the complete LOTR broken into the three books. I quite enjoyed listening to the FOTR while driving back and forth to work.
That is my two pence worth. YMMV.
dzimmerm
Jumping to correct solutions slowly is better than jumping to incorrect solutions quickly.
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
I've worked with Academy Award winning animators and effects people, and their #1 continual complaint is that their clients have no imagination. They whine that they get asked to do the same effects over and over, because the director saw some effect somewhere else and wants to copy it.
If there really was one gram of creativity anywhere in the movie world, Jackson would write an original script instead of adapting an existing work. Creativity is such boring work, it's easier to copy.
Yes, 5 seconds per frame IS a big deal. I do some rendering and it takes FOREVER to render just 1 second of DV quality (720*480 at 29.97 FPS) footage. Last time I did a big render, it took about 55 seconds per frame, so that's almost half an hour for a single second of video. If I was able to shave 5 seconds per frame off, that translates to 2.5 minutes per second of rendered video. It doesn't sound like much, but every little bit helps when you're rendering 45 seconds of video.
Unfortunately, Maya's good renderer doesn't use my graphics hardware. It's really too bad because I have a GeForce 4 Ti 4400 and I'm sure that it would speed up my renderings a lot.
Of course, Weta's old cluster is a lot better than anything I'm ever going to be working with, but they also render at obscene resolutions to keep things like Gollum looking smooth and crisp. I wonder how fast their new cluster renders.
Well, New Zealand's not a big country, you know. Not to mention they have to fit in all the sheep as well as computer clusters.
Tony Williams
Creativity is such boring work...
Real creativity is risky. It's less risky to copy a proven winner. Make a creative flop, get the blame. Copy a proven formula and you're likely to profit. And that's at the bottom of all this, isn't it.
Tolkien said he intended nothing more than to tell a tale that he hoped others would find entertaining. I am persuaded his love for his craft was greater than his hope of profiting greatly from the sharing of it. He must have expected that it would also bore many people...
There have been several stories about these huge clusters used to speed up rendering. Do any consumer level home video apps support offloading to other hosts?
The available tools are becoming extremely powerful. iMovie and Final Cut on MacOS are great. There are several good Windows options too. But, the conversion from MiniDV to MEPG2 for DVD takes several hours.
How long before they include an agent to load on other hosts, to distribute processing? It seems like this would be pretty easy to implement. Is anyone doing it?
I would just like to know why 588 computers?
IBM Blade Center that holds the blade server is 7U. Each Blade Center holds 14 blade servers. IBM's racks are 42U.
42U Rack / 7U Blade Center = 6 Blade Centers/rack
14 servers X 6 Blade Centers = 84 servers/rack
7 Racks X 84 servers = 588 Servers
588 blades
x 2CPUs each
== 1176 physical CPU's
x 2cpus/cpu (hyperthreading on the xenons)
== 2352 hyperthreaded cpu's
x 2.8GHz
== 6585.6GHz
~6.6THz
well... thats a just a bit of rendering power, wonder whats gona happen once they are done with them. Which also makes me wonder, what happended to that somewhat famous renderfarm for toystory? Seems whenever a movie requiring horsepower like this comes out, they just buy new equipment since the stuff used on the last movie is probably obsolete already... ohwell
Tm
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But then Tolkien was a little bit uncomfortable with the world-creating industry embodied in his own works as well. The root of Melkor's evil in the Silmarillion is his desire to create his own world (when really all he can do is warp the existing one--changing elves into orcs). The conflict between Tolkien's utter devotion to his desire for unreal worlds and his willingness to look at the dark side of that desire makes for both interesting reading and interesting viewing. (It's a particularly relevant theme for geeks, I think.)