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Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire
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."
Are we going to see a "Meet the Feebles part 2" or what?
Rent a Bit of Weta Digital
So now instead of curing diseases, finding large mersenne primes or discovering inteligent life forms we can get hyper realisitc renderings of Gollum's eyelash crust. Spectacular.
This is the top 500
fifteen jugglers, five believers
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.
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
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.
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
my precious.....
Thanks to WETA, now I can run Doom 3!
Click here for a free picture of an iPod!
to other ppl that need to render stuff. Im sure they could figure out some reasonable pricing vs CPU time etc.
Where can I rent an analog one?
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.
Imagine Peter Jackson making a cluster of Beowulf movies using those...
a world in progress...
Missle trajectories: supercomputers can help design accurate missle systems, and missle defense systems. See 1 for why this should be restricted.
;)
Missile trajectories? All you need to calculate that stuff is a Playstation2... Quick! We need to keep these "supercomputers" inside honest nations too
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)
> 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).
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
How about using all those cpus as Distcc nodes!
(Go Gentoo!)
If someone paid to rent a supercomputer for a few hours to break your SHA1 SSL keys, you've got bigger problems than just your keys being broken :)
Yep. Enough for Doom3, or Longhorn. Possibly even enough to run doom3 IN longhorn!!
455fe10422ca29c4933f95052b792ab2
with your budget you probably could play for excatly 1 second...
Well it's called 'Brain Dead' down here, so I'd suggest either 'Brain Deader' or 'Dubya'.
"Headshot Barry! It's the only true stopper!"
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.
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!
Dude, Eniac computed artillery trajectories. A PS2 could probably do the onboard realtime guidance, nav and detonation sequence :-)
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!
That's 40GB *each*... > 20TB total.
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.
Actually they've decided not to use any digital effects for King Kong. Peter Jackson will be wearing a gorilla suit.
Why do you think they're renting out the cluster?
Game... blouses.
We will now truly be able to figure out how many New Zealanders it takes to change a light bulb.
Just one, but he won't change the bulb - he'll fix it using bind-a-twine and 8-guage fencing wire.
(Disclaimer: exiled Kiwi)
This is where the serious fun begins.
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!
Read this
:-P
"Weta Digital Supercomputer For Hire"
as
"Weta Digital Supercomputer On Fire"
Thought, whoa, finally some big news on Slashdot!
But no... Anyone willing to go with me to put them on fire for some hot Beowulf cluster action?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
Do they use Tolkien Ring?
~D
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.
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...
They tried, but they discovered an error in the protocol whereby the one who held the token wouldn't let it go.
=)
Lost at C:>. Found at C.