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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."

4 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
  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. 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!

  4. 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!