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Third Largest Supercomputer... at Weta Digital
Designadrug writes "This story at the BBC details how the worlds third largest supercomputer (conditions apply) lives at Weta Digital - the company that provided CGI effects for The Lord of the Rings movies. The article also goes on to discuss the 500 TeraBytes of data generated for the films and how the epic Battle of Pelennor Fields almost defeated the film itself."
It was the IBM eServer BladeCenter
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
*cough* Top500 List *cough*
HFS+ has no theoretical limit on file size. It is limited only by the size of the volume (Max 16TB in Panther).
See Apple Knowledgebase article 25557 for more.
Saying the WETA render farm is the third largest machine in the world based on the number of processors is wrong. Just check the latest top 500 list and a quick skim points out that Lawrence Livermore National Lab's ASCI White (8192) and ASCI Blue Pacific (5808), Lawrence Berkeley National Lab/NERSC's seaborg (6656), Sandia National Lab's ASCI Red (9632), and Los Alamos National Lab's ASCI Blue Mountain (6144) all have more processors as well as the two already listed.
Also interesting that WETA Digital is listed as #44 on the list too, huh? They only listed a Xeon cluster though with 1080 processors. (prolly not be the same machine, but...).
I love technical articles from the popular press about technical subjects. They do soooo much in depth research. I hope that they don't hurt themselves.
*Disgusted look*
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
The system is called Massive. During one of the early runs they noticed the guys in the back (on both sides) were wandering off. The problem was that they couldn't 'see' the action so they wandered around randomly looking for opponents. The effect was that it looked like they were running away. The problem was solved by giving the agents something similar to the ability to hear. Thus they could sense the action over greater distances and act accordingly.
I've seen this misrepresented so many times it's begun to bug me. I believe all the information I just dropped is available on the Extended Edition DVDs special features (probably FotR). If not, then I'm sure a Google search will turn it up.