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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."
and for a limited time only... things change tooooo quickly these, todays supercomputer is tomorrows laptop
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Those numbers are nice and all, but what kind of processors are they? I doubt that they are x86...
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Future films will use even more digital effects and will require even more data storage. If you consider Bill Gate's famous 640K quote, it won't be long until you'll have a 500 Exabyte keychain...
the whole article only mentions the processor number to quantify it being a super computer. no tera-flops/seconds. nothing else. they may have the 3rd largest number of processors actively running at one time but a super computer that does not make.
I doubt Google has any one "host" with that many CPUs. As I understand it, they have thousands of machines that work (mostly) independently of each other. Google's goal is to perform a very large number of short tasks very quickly. Weta's goal is to perform one very large task as quickly as possible.
Weta's goal is to perform one very large task as quickly as possible.
Maybe not, if you render frame by frame you end up with lots of independ tasks.
Jeroen
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No, rendering each frame is a separate task. This more comparable to Google than to traditional supercomputing applications.
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Maybe something along the lines of paying for processing time, on millions of computers would get the work done like seti@home.
This brings up an interesting topic.
In my opinion what makes special effects add to a film like LOTRs is not how spectacular they look in isolation, but how the director integrates them into their film.
From what I gather, Mr. Jackson was heavily involved (and very knowledgeable) on what effects were being used where, and he was also very specific as to what he wanted.
A hallmark of a good effects film is where you can't tell where the effects begin and where the effects end. Regardless of how good your effects are, if the audience can identify them directly your not going to captivate them as completely.
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Indeed, the good effect is where it comes off as believable and not even noticed. It doesn't matter HOW they did the effect, the bottom line is if it works in the movie.
There are certainly scenes though in movies where it's an obvious effect and doesn't look real. But the ultimate moments in modern effects is where the ONLY way you could tell it's an effect is knowing in your head that such things don't exist.
To this day, one of the most convincing scene is still the original "Jurrasic ParK" where Jeff Goldblum strikes his flair and waves it at the T-Rex...the scene where the T-Rex is chasing him looks like they captured a real T-Rex and put it in the movie. I mean, my jaw just dropped.
There are certainly parts in the LOTR movies that are like this also, that you only know they are effects because they couldn't have done them in real life. Sure, there are parts of these movies where the effects fall short...with the amount of shots in this movie and the amount of time and limit of money (yes, 350 million for 3 huge movies isn't really that much these days), there will be some scenes that could have used more attention. For instance the warg scene in "The Two Towers" could have used more work (PJ even comments on this in the commentary for the DVD). But still, the scene works.
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