Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire

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Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire

Posted by timothy on Monday September 6, 2004 @06:53PM from the hey-sailor dept.

sushi writes "NZ's Stuff news site is reporting: 'Peter Jackson's special effects shop Weta Digital has teamed ... to establish a world-class supercomputing facility in Wellington which will be rented out to clients worldwide.' Currently comprising 504 IBM blade servers, each of which contains two 2.8 Gigahertz Intel Xeon processors, 6 Gigabytes of memory and 40 Gigabytes of storage, and ranked 80th in the top 500 supercomputers, they are intending to upgrade into the top 10. Also covered at the Australian Financial Review."

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Dupe? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-06 18:55 · Score: 5, Informative

Rent a Bit of Weta Digital
top 500 ! by phreakv6 · 2004-09-06 18:59 · Score: 5, Informative

This is the top 500

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fifteen jugglers, five believers
Re:6gig of memory? by Omega+Hacker · 2004-09-06 19:02 · Score: 3, Informative

Only 6gig of memory? Is it me or that that seem a stupidly low amount when dealing with a amachine of this power?

That's 6GB for each of the 504 (not 512??) nodes, or 3GB per processor, almost 3TB total. Trust me, that's plenty for all but the most extreme uses.

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GStreamer - The only way to stream!
Re:An idea... by mefus · 2004-09-06 19:22 · Score: 2, Informative

Computational Grid is working out the logistics, and has a software package that'll get you on the grid.

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mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
Re:6gig of memory? by Syzar · 2004-09-06 20:07 · Score: 3, Informative

Remember that those 6 gigs of ram are per node. Total combined ram is 6gigs * 504nodes = 3024 gigs ram. Grandparent propably meant to say that 6 gigs are enough per node.
Re:Correction? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-06 20:13 · Score: 3, Informative

Not quite, Weta have two clusters. The cluster for rent (that the article is about) was built only to supplement Weta's primary cluster (and get the films out on time).
It has 1080 processors (540 blade servers) and is at rank 80.
Weta's primary cluster (not for rent!) has 1176 processors and is at rank 77.
Re:This is great by Old+Telco+Guy · 2004-09-06 20:25 · Score: 2, Informative

Dude, Eniac computed artillery trajectories. A PS2 could probably do the onboard realtime guidance, nav and detonation sequence :-)
Re:40 Gigabytes of storage.. by Anonymous Coward · 2004-09-06 20:33 · Score: 2, Informative

That's 40GB *each*... > 20TB total.