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New Lucas Headquarters To Open in San Francisco
Afroloop writes "This article (with pics) in the SFGate covers the opening of the new Lucas Headquarters in San Francisco's famous Presidio. It will house up to 1,500 employees by next fall. From the article: 'The Presidio will feature 600 miles of fiber-optic cable. 4,000 processors and 150 terabytes of storage -- massive computing power and speed, with the ability to work 10 times faster than they can today.'"
"Presidio" means "military fortification" in Spanish.
The Presidio used to be a Spanish military base, then a Mexican military base, and then I think it was briefly military base for California when we were briefly a soverign entity, and then finally, it remained an American military base from 1849 until the early 1990s.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
I, for one, pity Poor Wee George, so unable to make the smaller films he has so craved.
Too, we must take comfort in the fact that has gathered sufficient moss that he won't be hitting the road next year, when he turns 62
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
... for storage. That honor goes to the Internet Archive with over 500TB.
I think a lot of knew about this (those who live in SF that is) My roomate and I live like 2 blocks from the presidio and we used to talk about it and how we wanted to get a job there. That was two years ago. It's right on the edge of the Presidio near the Marina.
From http://www.nps.gov/prsf/
Certain areas are rented to non-profit groups, and much is set aside for public space, but development in the Presidio is required for it to pay for itself. It is the only National Park Service unit expected to do so.
The Presidio Trust site is here.
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
Not everyone is happy about Lucasfilm moving to the Presido. Here's a sample: from the San Francisco Bay Guardian
Lucas bid on putting something on the Presidio as a lark and was surprised when he won. The new headquarters combines all of Lucas's companies into I place; Lucas Arts, Lucasfilm, THX, ILM, Lucas Merchandising. Before this alot of it was at Skywalker Ranch and the rest scattered throughout California. He thought that since the video game company and the movie company were often working in much the same thing that they should work together more. Also, no more episodes even after he dies. Lucas has specifically made it so that no one can use the Star Wars property after he dies.
You want to work there .. it's not impossible! I saw an image in a prior article a few weeks back which detailed the uses for each building in the project. About one and a half of them - a whole heck of a lot of space - were reserved for leasing to third parties, somewhat like other office co-ops in SF.
In this SFGate image, it's the rightmost building and half of the one next to it that were slated for subleasing. So, get yourself into a little company and move the offices there!
Ah, here we go. Various articles about the subleasing.
"However, I think this is more of Lucas fullfilling his dreamstudio than something extremely future focused."
Not necessarily true. While what you state here has parts of truth in it, this facility is in fact top notch. I worked a great deal on this facility and have seen that it has a lot of features that will allow it to last and be updated for a long time in a very efficient way. I cannot give away a lot of detail, but the following statements may (or may not) be entirely true about this facility:
- multiple fibre runs to every workstation
- ability for any/all workstations in the facility to participate in the render clusters
- many hundreds of Gigabits of bandwidth between server areas
- security designed into the network implementation
- a beautiful facility
- a very neat, and innovative datacenter design
make no mistake, this facility is really well designed. Though it will be a challenge to run operationally, I wouldnt miss the chance to work on it...
Hopefully Lucas will create great things from there, in addition to their other facilities and locations - but the primary difference was that those early locations all grew organically as needed - which wasnt always the best way to grow. Now there is a facility that was initially designed based on the vast experience they have with their workflow in an effort to design a site that would scale and provide flexibility in how mass amounts of creative content are produced.
Total spinning disk capacity on Internet Archive machines is actually around 2PB (2000TB) currently... but mostly at another colo facility across town.
Not that I'm a fan of B5 or anything.