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Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire

Posted by timothy on 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."

10 of 184 comments (clear)

  1. Correction? by iamdrscience · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hmm... if you look at the top 500 it appears that 80th was their previous place and that they have since upgraded their cluster to become 77th.

  2. rent it out by OneArmedMan · · Score: 4, Insightful

    to other ppl that need to render stuff. Im sure they could figure out some reasonable pricing vs CPU time etc.

  3. This is great by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful
    Supercomputing for the masses. I hope that Weta will filter out possible terrorist computations. By terrorist computations I mean:
    1. Nuclear simulation: these days most of the world's nuclear research is done using supercomputers due to the obvious environmental impact of doing real live tests. These computations should be kept to honest nations such as the United States and Britain.
    2. Missle trajectories: supercomputers can help design accurate missle systems, and missle defense systems. See 1 for why this should be restricted.
    3. Exhaustive security computations: these days MD5 and SHA1 can be cracked with enough horsepower. I don't want my SHA1 SSL keys to be recovered because someone rented a machine for 10 hours
  4. Re:6gig of memory? by Gopal.V · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > almost 3TB total

    Do remember that 90% of the time, it's not the size that matters , but the organization.

    I've worked on a relatively small cluster processing experiment in college with 12 boxes on a 10 Mbps LAN with a combined memory of 1.5 Gb RAM . It might not look much , but with 32 MB of RAM on each box (each had 128 MB ram) being held by the home cooked shared memory daemon (this was waaay before memcached was born, Ok) , the boxes ran the number crunching beautifully .

    The operation needed was simple, to sort and process an amazingly HUGE chunk of data in almost realtime (in this case some wierd algorithm some Mech teacher wanted and did up in C).

    Anyway in about 7 weeks and reusing a dozen of the college's vanilla PCs we did a LOT of interesting things .

    So my question is , how's the server connected memory wise (most of these tasks are highly memory bound or at least that's the major bottleneck to optimise).

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  5. Re:Doomsday scenario by Vellmont · · Score: 5, Insightful


    How soon before the bad guys set up a dummy corporation and start running nuclear bomb or protein folding simulations on this cluster?

    The hardest part by far in making a nuclear weapon is getting the fissile material. If you are able to get highly enriched uranium you don't even need to do any simulations, the design is fairly simple and no testing is needed. Plutonium is a bit harder.

    The point though is that computer simulations of nuclear weapons is the least of your problems, and is by no means required. Computers aren't secrets, and getting a few hundred of them together in a cluster is a task anyone with $100,000 can easily accomplish. Compared to getting the required fissile material, any required computations are easy.

    I'm not sure what you're getting at with protein folding. Is their some doomsday weapon you can create by knowing how proteins fold? Even if it is, it's not a big concern. No one has gotten even close to completely simulating a protein folding. There's simply not enough computing power yet. What's been done to date are just small scale simulations.

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  6. Re:An idea... by Vellmont · · Score: 4, Insightful


    You know, that only has ~500 nodes right?

    It has 500 nodes that are highly and quickly interconnected. It's like the difference between 500 people working on a problem in the same room, and 500 people spread across the country communicating by postal mail. Most interesting problems require a lot of inter-communication, so 500 slowly connect nodes isn't too usefull.

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  7. Re:Awesome by Jerry+Talton · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It really cracks me up that you rate finding large mersenne primes in the same category as curing disease or discovering other intelligent life forms. Talk about something with no practical applications...

  8. Re:Awesome by mod_parent_down · · Score: 2, Insightful
    or discovering inteligent life

    Or, you know, a spell-cheeker...

  9. Re:Nah... by empaler · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yeah, let's start making jokes that are about things we can *all* agree on are funny.

    No point in dragging down a person who has proclaimed himself to be the most devout Christian since the Apostles.

  10. Re:Awesome by LoudMusic · · Score: 2, Insightful

    You mention using it for the standard distributed projects, but what about the computers that are already running these projects? Are they not part of a super computer? A type of cluster? Surely the fellas (and ladies?) at distributed.net and / or the SETI@Home crew could write up a simple distributed RMAX app to test how much CPU time is available on the internet. Submit those numbers to the top500.org and see where you end up. I bet it'd put the Earth Simulator to shame.

    Now, for 'real time', it'd be shat. But the computational power is there. It's just a high latency cluster.

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