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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. Doomsday scenario by ciurana · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Hrm...

    How soon before the bad guys set up a dummy corporation and start running nuclear bomb or protein folding simulations on this cluster? I'd be very interested (probably along with some governments) in Weta's and Gen-i screening processes. Will anyone who can foot the bill get access?

    I know, this is tinfoil hat stuff, but it's late and I get this "glass half full" visions when I'm sleep deprived.

    Cheers,

    E

    --
    http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
    1. Re:Doomsday scenario by jesterzog · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How soon before the bad guys set up a dummy corporation and start running nuclear bomb or protein folding simulations on this cluster? I'd be very interested (probably along with some governments) in Weta's and Gen-i screening processes. Will anyone who can foot the bill get access?

      I think it would depend on how open it is. The New Zealand government is strongly anti-nuclear (however rational or irrational that may be). eg. US nuclear vessels aren't allowed within the NZ economic zone. This type of stance is mostly on principle based on popular opinion (rational or otherwise), much to the country's disadvantage in things like trade deals. New Zealand is small enough that popular opinion can still have quite a knee-jerk effect on most government policy.

      If you're referring to businesses or other governments when you say "bad guys", it wouldn't be unexpected for the NZ government to step in and say "you can't do that", irrespective of what WETA might want to do.

      If there's some way to run such simulations without making it clear what's being done, then it might be possible. With something that's so high profile, though, it'd be very difficult to get away with it, without at least some people having an idea of what's going on, or at least being suspicious enough to enquire further.

  2. An idea... by Veridium · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know, that only has ~500 nodes right? How many people out there are either out of work, or sick of doing what they're doing? Maybe we ought to get about 1000 of us nerds together in some kind of co-op, cluster our machines then rent it out? My main box is dual opterons and I already have 6 dual P-pro 200s clustered...

    Yeah, I know, the logistics of it, the devil would be in every detail... Neat to think about though.

    --
    Think for yourself, destroy your television.
  3. Re:Image a... by nz_mincemeat · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Another movie will probably take too long to render before that renderfarm is needed again for one of Weta's own jobs. Hence hiring out CPU hours while it's sitting still doing very little (and helps pay the rent too, I suppose)

  4. Weta's old cluster by SlashdotMeNow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    We actually bought the old cluster Jackson used (for next to nothing I might add!) It's 62 PCs (no they run Windows) totalling 124 processors (2 racks full)

    That's a total of 124GHz and 124GB of RAM. We're using it to render architectural fly-through movies.

    Hmm... I'm all hot now... Need a cold shower!

  5. Re:This is great by PCM2 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Are you kidding? You don't need a Playstation2 or any other kind of supercomputer to plot missile trajectories. Terrorists had no trouble doing that with archaic 6502 processors back in the early 1980s.

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  6. Noooooooo.... laptop hard drives... by ricky-road-flats · · Score: 5, Interesting
    We've had big problems using IBM blades, not least because by default they come with crappy 5400rpm laptop hard drives - and the 40 GB mentioned in these blades imply that's what they've got (which is what my predecessor ordered).

    I guess with 6 GB RAM each they shouldn't have to do much (or ANY, if I was running this) swapping, and if the jobs are tweaked to not use the hard drives too intensively, they might be OK. If what you do uses the hard drives for much, they are sh*t, to put it mildly. If you could plug these into the blades, they's be very useful, quick machines. But you can't yet.

    The really crap thing is, if you do want SCSI drives in the IBM blades, you connect a module ot the side of the blade which gives you a couple of proper SCSI drive bays. Which halves the number of blades-per-bladecenter to 7.

    Given the bladecenter is 7U tall, you'd be better off with 7 1U servers with SCSI bays already in and better NIC options. The internal networking of the bladecenter is awful for everything but the simplest low-requirement setups - it's hideously expensive to give each blade a couple of gigabit connections.

    Even these cheap little things are 1U, take 2 U320 SCSI drives, and have dual Gigabit connections built-in.

    And I *still* can't get USB dongles to work with thes fscking blades, grumble grumble.

    Having said all that, when can I play on this thing? My Folding@Home could do with a bit of a boost, and with Hyperthreading I could have 2016 units running simultaneously.... although it might get a little warm behind the racks, 1008 2.8 GHz Xeons pump out a good bit of heat!

  7. Small potatoes by rumblin'rabbit · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm surprized this is ranked as 80'th, because it's not that large by todays standards. Even some mid-sized geophysical processing companies, for example, can beat it. Large ones might have 5 or 10 times this capacity.

    If they're going to market this capacity, they had better do it quick. The shelf life of computational power is not much greater than milk.

  8. Weta Digital please read this! by natefanaro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think you should run SETI for one day. I would love to see how many work units can be computed. It would probably set a record.

  9. What about #77 by beaverbrother · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Theres no reference to WETA DIGITAL's second cluster, #77 on the list. It contains 588 computers as opposed to 504.
    top 500 page for the cluser here
    Why don't they just combine the two. That would surely grant them a top 10 spot...