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Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital

Posted by timothy on from the route-bits-through-mordor dept.

An anonymous reader writes linking to this story at stuff.co.nz, excerpting: "Five hundred powerful computers used by Weta Digital to help create the special effects for the Lord of the Rings may be put up for hire.... The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 [gigabytes?] of memory." Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S : The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.

8 of 210 comments (clear)

  1. I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this by SexyKellyOsbourne · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm rather tired of waiting for graphics to progress to the level they will be in in the year 2010 or so. I'd like to see these machines, which rendered Lord of the Rings, use their nearly unlimited processing power to let me play a game -- perhaps Half-Life or Quake 2 with a new rendering DLL -- to spit out 60fps of pure ray-traced bliss.

    Or just fire up InTrace with a scene of 1 billion polygons of a super-detailed scene of sunflowers, with multiple reflections and all the other goodies, and crank it to 1600x1200.

    I can dream, can't I? :)

  2. One thing to say... by linuxkrn · · Score: 5, Interesting

    seti@home!

    1. Re:One thing to say... by CGP314 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      folding@home

      I used to run seti@home instead of folding@home, but then one day I realized I needed to switch. While finding extraterrestrial life would be the most important development in human history to date, the chances of finding it in my lifetime are very small.

      On the other hand, the chances of my getting cancer or any of the other of the diseases folding@home works on is very great. Plus, if folding@home cures any of these diseases, it will extend my life and increase the chances that extraterrestrials will be found within my lifetime.


      -Colin

  3. Distributed.net... by rthille · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Imagine distributed.net being a CPU co-op. They take problems from clients in need of a ton of CPU, farm it out to distributed.net members, and at the end of the month/year you get a small check for all the CPU cycles you spent helping solve problems.

    --
    Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
  4. Maybe they're right by ctr2sprt · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Update: 03/22 07:08 GMT by S: The linked story says 6 megabytes of memory, we don't believe 'em.
    They might mean 6MB of L2 cache. I don't know what cache sizes are available for Xeons, but probably when you order 1000 CPUs at once Intel are willing to give you hard-to-find stuff.
  5. Renderfarms online - old news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Posting anon as I have an interest in some of these companies :
    http://www.respower.com/ - 250+ machines (~500GHz), 250GB ram
    http://www.rendercore.com/ - 700 machines
    http://www.render-it.co.uk/ - 82 cpus (131GHz), 82GB ram)

    The only 'interesting' thing here is that it's WETA's farm. Other than that, I doubt they offer the wide selection of software (lest they struck deals lately) not to mention field experience with 'oddball' files.

    Good luck to them, though

  6. 6 Gigabytes on a 32bit CPU? by ProfessionalCookie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Correct me if I'm wrong here but aren't the Xeons currently 32 bit? Doesn't that mean they can't address more than 4 Gigs? I thought that's what the whole big deal was with 64 bit. Now maybe if they were G5s...

  7. STOP THAT 6MB LAME JOKES by robbyjo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Please...

    This may be an old news, but the details of that machine is here. That's some stuff to drool over. Some excerpts:

    ... provide a combination of 4TB of online storage and more than 20TB of nearline storage as a global storage repository ...

    ... create and manage up to 100TB of data ...

    And now this machine is up for a rent. Here's the company website.

    --

    --
    Error 500: Internal sig error