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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."
All the thing says is that IBM did the manufacturing ... were they xSeries, pSeries or zSeries? :-)
:)
(I doubt the zSeries.... nobody buys 3300 processors' worth of mainframe
and for a limited time only... things change tooooo quickly these, todays supercomputer is tomorrows laptop
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Those numbers are nice and all, but what kind of processors are they? I doubt that they are x86...
--- I hate my sig.
Be interesting to know what kind of a file system they use one something like this, and while they say loads and loads of data was generated - how and in what format was it actually stored.
:)
MySQL is prolly not the best fit in this situation
they don't have to go to 'Los Alamos National Lab' or 'Earth simulator' to shoot scene with cool super computer and hundreds of geeks (saves them on extras :-)
At least assembly isn't required...
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...
He is confident... "King Kong is covered in hair," he said, "we could be animating that."
Is it just me, or does that sound more desperate than confident?
If they're just counting the number of cpu's available to do a particular task, don't you then have to include things like Googles setup (10000+)?
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.
Oh and it was fun to read Houston's comment: "We needed another 1,000 processors and we had nowhere to put them" - Someone must have surely commented "Houston, we have a problem!"
http://efil.blogspot.com/
I'm really looking forward to Weta doing more amazing special effects work in future projects.. without them, LOTR movies would be, of course, still good, but probably wouldn't have the amazing success among the mainstream, non-geek audience.
Actually, I'm drooling right now thinking what could they do with "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" - depending on how much their stuff would be used in the movie.
If I collected 5121 computers (486s) and connected them all together I would have the largest supercomputer in the world?
"Yeah, IBM? Yeah. . . Apple told me there was a four week wait for my G5. Could ya crank out a couple for me? Thanks. Hugs to all. . ."
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
When he could do beowolf and bring down /. under a rush of nerds posting the same joke?
_O_
.|< The named which can be named is not the true named
...In the 80's.
I am a T-1000 Model.
I have a neural-net processah in a metal alloy exo-skeleton, covered in living tissue.
Honestly now, these video rendering super-computer can't touch a T-1000!
-
They also built the models for the ships used in Master and Commander, but the computer graphics were handled elsewhere.
After seeing these films, I'm going to be very keen indeed to see what these Kiwis can come up with next!
*cough* Top500 List *cough*
And, as always, please show your work
-Patrick
"They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
"The Return of the King, which had more than 1500 special effects shots in it. By contrast the first movie had only 400 and the second 900."
The funny thing is that personally I lovedthe first movie, really liked the second, and... well... the third movie was pretty good too but seemed a little long.
Many factors could have contributed to this, but after hearing all of Jackson's encomia to model work and miniatures in the DVD "documentaries," I have to wonder whether the increased use of digital effects contributed in some subtle way to some loss of mood or atmosphere or reality in the third movie.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Granted, this list http://www.top500.org/list/2003/11/ is a couple of months old but it shows WETA much lower in the rankings.
"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
... would the hair be animated, the hairs would be fighting each other!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
I'm sure that there are landfills that beat this setup...
second society
Maybe something along the lines of paying for processing time, on millions of computers would get the work done like seti@home.
Personally, I'm looking forward to the 2005 release of the 100000-DVD-set with all 500TB of extra footage and of making of documentaries.
erroneous: look me up in a dictionary
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these! :D
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
2 posts ago they were building stonehenge, now they have the 3rd largest supercomputer in the world.
I for one...
That's going over the edge and swimming across the ocean right there.
Mix the failings of Usenet with the shortcomings of the World Wide Web and the result is slashdot.
Isn't it the point of supercomputing to get work done more quickly? Big deal if the gear that does it is big. Isn't it a loftier goal to get the most work done in the least amount of space? Or, in the case of this article, with the fewest number of processors?
I can't wait until WETA does Evangelion. It literally cant be any lesser than 3 times the movie King Kong will be, because it's based around 3 giant mecha... When I find out that it's rated PG-13 however, I will commit suicide.
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?
Umm, they're finished now. Why not go see them?
Why is anything anything?
From the Top500 List for November 2003:
Earth Simulator - 5120
LANL / ASCI Q - 8192
LLNL / ASCI White - 8192
NERSC / LBNL / Seaborg - 6656
Nice research, BBC.
The T-1000 was that liquid metal guy in Terminator 2. Arnold played a T-9something or whatever. And the other poster is right. It's an ENDOskeleton! Exo-skeletons are what crustaceans and insects have.
Jeeze, man, get your terminator facts straight!
Just for an added showoff of my knowledge of useless facts, the actual line mentioning the processor was: "My CPU is a neural net processah: a learning computer."
Much better would be to use a Grid-type approach that lets Weta call on processing power where-ever it is and when it needs it.
I'm sure that it's obvious, but so is every other great idea I've ever had. So, here's the business plan:
The cure for cancer is coming: Reovirus
Oops, sorry about that. I don't know why the site is password protected without the "www" at the beginning.
Third largest super computer and for what? Entertainment. I don't know, it just seems like a skewed sense of priorities. Cancer research, fusion research, any number of possible alternative uses come to mind.
The article spoke of drawing additional computing power from other sources (à la grid computing). I didn't see a mention of it offering any computer power to anyone during their business "troughs".
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
...that one of the largest computers in the world is used for entertainment...love the movies tho, so I guess I can't complain too much :-)
-c
did each haird have it's own AI and fighting style?
Their English pamphlet states that it's a simulator of the environment on the Earth, and that it's used to predict the effects of some events on the global environment.
It's not a supercomputer, it's a render farm - there's a big difference. I'm sure there there are several VFX companies that have that number of processors in their renderfarm. The one I work for has somewhere between 2000 and 2500 processors in it, and I'm sure companies like PDI, ILM and Escape have more.
.rib file from scene for frame # .rib .rib to PRMan
The way the render farms tend to work is this: you have a bunch of jobs, which get sent to the farm. You'll have a bit of software which allocates each job to a computer, or set of computers. Your job might be something like:
for frames 1 - 100
generate
munge
send
This would generate 300 jobs that will get allocated on the farm - obviously some of them are dependent on others being completed. However, each section of the job is a standard program on a fairly standard (normally) Linux install.
If all the computers were being combined into a supercomputer, they wouldn't all be running their own programs, they'd be combined into a huge 'virtual' computer, presumably with each processor running a virtual thread on that computer.
Not even by their own silly measure of number of processors are they third.
He never said it, and even if he did, it was correct--in 1982, 640K was all anyone would ever need. The statement was not false.
The article says it is third by #of CPUs, not by Teraflops or by any computational measure.
Someone could come up with 10.000 dreamcasts linked up together for a few bucks these days, and while it would have quite some rendering power, that does not make it the first supercomputer in the world just because it has more chips in it!
(Score +1, Obvious)
--- "I didn't think anyone would understand it" -Prof. Bob Muller
I don't want to sound like some tin-foil hat wearing loony, but im sure that those comments will inevitably follow, but, do people really think this list is accurate? With our governments tendency to be very secretive about national security these days, it isn't unreasonable to assume that our most powerful computing resources are public knowledge. The government certainly doesn't want other nations to know even the theoretical limits of our weapons testing programs, etc.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals."
From the article:
"The result was that within two weeks the new data centre was finished and helping prepare the battle for the big screen."
"Finding and moving the data for that sequence out of storage so it could be reworked for the second film took about three days."
They can coordinate with IBM to install 1,000 new PCs in a new datacenter with 10Gb from the telco in 2 weeks, but it takes them three days to find a few files?
"Only" 3300 processors? Isn't it said Google has more than 1000000?
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
It is the Two Towers Extended Edition, actually. Very nice feature on Massive in it.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
That the system is collectively known as "the precious".
But Nyarlethotep Invests - ask him how...
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
It's supposedly in the works by WETA, Let's hope it get's the full attention it needs from weta's box of toys. http://eva.trivialbeing.net/
...He rested.