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Weta Digital Grows Cluster
Korgan writes "A little over 3 years after their last upgrade, Weta Digital has just added another 250 more blade servers to their render farm to help with the final renderings of King Kong. From the article: "The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world." And all that computing power is still available for hire when Peter Jackson isn't using it."
So, out of curiosity. What happened to the export restrictions of the US government on CPU's beyond a certain MIPS range? I remember that the old PowerMac 9600/300 eclipsed this federally mandated figure and now we have home game consoles that easily eclipse that performance range. Certainly the advent of cluster computing with commodity hardware made many of these issues moot, but what is the status of the law? Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?
I know that historically, NeXT did quite a bit of work for TLA agencies and that Richard Crandall's program, zilla.app grabbed some attention from interested parties. Because of this work, NeXT had some cash infusion for their hardware even after shutting the line down for general commercial consumption. More recently, Apple has been selling Xserves to some of those same agencies, and contractors for work, but I do not know if they are selling any clusters outside the US?
The history of course behind this law was that the CIA and NSA were concerned that foreign governments could use compute time to help design nuclear weapons as well as defeat cryptography that might compromise US secrets.
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Clearly we need a Beowulf cluster to slay this gigantic King Kong cluster!
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That's nothing. The people arrested in the story earlier today had the computing power of 100,000 personal computers. Beat that!
...a Beowulf cluster of these.
I read
render farm to help with the final renderings of King Kong
Am I the only one who prefers models and stop motion animation to the CGI garbage of the last 15 years?
that's why the lights dim in Wellington when the cluster is rendering
Yikes, It seems like most stuff linked to New Zealand go down pretty quick after being linked on Slashdot, so....
Weta spends up on blade servers
10 October 2005
Weta Digital has bought 250 more blade servers with a total list price of between $2 million and $3 million to complete post-production work on Peter Jackson's King Kong, due out in January.
The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington. They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world. Weta Digital has another bank of 500 blade servers in Miramar. It bought the processors that now make up the centre to finish the special effects for The Return of the King, after running out of space in its computer rooms in Miramar. The centre is a joint venture between Weta and Telecom-owned Gen-i, which supplied the latest batch of processors. Other businesses using the centre include a chip maker, a biotech company and a yacht designer.
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Sad to say that the pr0n industry has ruined this movie title forever.
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...can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?
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They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs
Total processors: 1644.
Now, the Xeons do a bit better than the run-of-the-mill P4, but 10x faster? No way.
For that matter, they don't run faster at all. They just do somewhat better (as in, 10-25%, not 913%) on certain types of memory-heavy tasks.
Someone either made a major typo or pulled numbers from their netherregion...
No matter how many CPUs they throw at it, Jackson's King Kong remake will nenver rival the hilarity of K-Y's remake. Funniest late night ad, ever.
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Blades are the way of the future, 250 blades take up 3 racks, we are on the way to a whole new meaning of SAN - Server Area Network.
link?
Star Wars Episode III : Revenge of the Sith was processed on
just a 140-processor Opteron AMD64 farm running Windows 64-bit beta.
Hmm, how to get them on my SETI team....
Such statements are utter nonsense. First, 15,000 PC's - what kind of PC? (dual core AMD, I think not). Second, how do you measure power ? (is this for their applications, or some other metric) If they ran the numbers they would find the cluster rather typical - unless there is more to the story.
Yes they have a a lot of processors, however, lots-o-processors != supercomputer
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Power of 1 PC: 250 Watts
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For everything else, there's xcalc.
I guess they'll live up to their promise of amazing gorilla hair... one blade server for each hair rendering...
I don't feel like it...
...Imagining a Beowulf cluster of King Kongs terrifies old people in Korea.
It must be one heck of a movie to require 250 blade servers to render it effectively. But then again, when you're working with graphics, it doesn't hurt to have a lot of horsepower.
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Man, I would love to see how fast Gentoo would compile on that.
In other news, New Zealand is accused by the ONU for not respecting the Kyoto treaty.
It appears that New Zealand is now the World n1 heat producer, the origin of that heat is currently unknown.
Well, joke aside, I hope for them than the clim won't break...
The amount of power that is needed to create a realistic outdoor scene with multiple actors is simply astounding. King Kong will most likely be candy for the eyes when it is done. Halo, the next Peter Jackson movie, will probably just as amazing.
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An interesting article on building a digital animation studio (IBM) is here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-
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Given the high degree of parallelism and the social aspects, you'd think that distributed computing would be ideal for hollywood rendering, given that you could implement sufficient security restrictions. (Security restrictions which should be perfectly managable.) How many people out there do you think would like to be able to say "I rendered part of this movie!"
There are some issues, of course, but it strikes me as worth exploring.
We already see this with routers, cell phones, PDAs, and other "fit in your hand, no/minimal screen/keyboard" computers.
20 years from now homes will be riddled with embedded systems that, but for a software change, could be relatively-low-performance general-purpose PCs.
The 2025 equivalent of "Home Computers" as we know it will either be small enough to fit into a keyboard or their function will be outsourced as a service and we'll all have terminals in our homes. Personally, I'm thinking the latter.
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The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory...
... now they might even be able to run Vista!
The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory
*drool*
Technoli
250 Blade Servers, + 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors = 15 000 PCs is INTEL-math.
They're multiplying the NumberOfProcessors, times the Frequency ( multiplied by pipeline-stages ), times the number of milli-amps used by each!
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Hire a proof reader or use some grammar checker. Even Microsnot Word flags this one.
It's about time those wimps over at Weta grew a cluster.
They have been added to the centre's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs.
... how do they get these 1644 PC processors to perform "with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs" ?!
so they had 1144 processors, they add 500 of them (250 dual cpu blades)
they are either comparing with Pentium 200 processors, totally bullshitting, or maybe they meant 1500 ?
The purchase means the centre is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world.
The last report of the top500 got it at the 99th position, althought it may be a bit out of date, as is from June.
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Since when does 1394 dual CPU systems = 15,000 PC's? That means each blade is 10 times faster than a normal PC. What are we measuring here. If your basing it on raw CPU power. You might be able to say it is twice as fast, but not 10. Even twice as fast is a stretch because dual processor contention with each other over resources and clustor management overhead.
They may have faster memory and IO buses, but the amount that would effect you depends on your application. In some cases it may not make much of a difference after the app initializes. I hate bogus claims like this.
Just use the same "average computer" performance values you did 10 years (or 5 years) ago.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Any ideas how I can convince Peter Jackson to join my Folding@home team?
I mean, come on. Why King Kong? Was the world really lacking yet another King Kong adaptation? This movie will make Gozilla look like Independence Day.
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It is a little tough to figure out from the Top 500 list, but before the addition of these processors, WETA seemed to have 3 entries in the top 200. Unless of course the article is completely wrong, and these 250 Blades are actually the third super computer that WETA has, and it really is a stand alone.
Too bad no-one's ever thought of using the fastest CPUs in these clusters and really doing something useful instead of using a huge number of weak CPUs to gain publicity.
Did Intel do a massive discount? The standard is Opteron for render farms and for good reason. Much faster, much less power, and a superior upgrade path. 150 watts for the fake dual core Xeon, or 89 for a dual core Opteron. Hmm, tough choice there. Particularly when you look at the new Spec numbers for the dual core Xeon it is a massacre with Opteron well ahead still.
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They can just snip those off in an outpatient procedure now.
Funny, this is the first thing I thought of when I read about their choice of processors. They really picked the most inefficient chips before (P4 2.8G) and just did it again with P4-based Xeons. For this application, it seems to me that Opterons would be the no-brainer choice. Go figure!
It would be cool to participate in a SETI-like rendering client for movie effects.
"Yes, well ya know I helped render that scene..."
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I read awhile back that Peter Jackson was hired by Microsoft to do a Halo movie? I wonder if WETA will be switching to Longhorn Server or if it will be made on Linux
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This movie is just about his early days before moving to the big city. He was just a simple country-ape back then. But even then, he had apirations to make it really big one day. His friends just called him Kong.
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Available for hire eh? Uh yeah...lemme just pull out my checkbook ;-).
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
Too bad they have all that computing power yet the gateway to the island still amounts to nothing more than muxing tin cans and string... ;)
They do have that. It's called BURP, the Big Ugly Rendering Project. it even runs on BOINC just like SETI. Jump onboard if you like.
http://burp.boinc.dk/
Parent is NOT offtopic, it IS however redundant!
http://www.techspot.com/news/19020-microsofts-halo -movie-produced-by-linux-servers.html
Given that there are about 35 people in the world who haven't seen one version or another yet, how worthwhile is any King Kong remake? I can't wait for Jackson to move onto another project like The Mote in God's Eye or the Foundation trilogy.
Time to burn a little karma :P
Korgan better watch out for RMS and GNU/flunkies. He called it: "Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system". Not: Red Hat version of the Free as in speach GNU/Linux operating system.
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SEED PLEASE!
First, read again, they only have 1144 intel 2.8GHz processors, not 2.6GHz two CPUs as you said.
Second, as someone has pointed out, indeed P3 performs faster than P4 in terms of Hz, due to the toooooo long instruction pipleline in P4.
Third, let's do very rough math. When you add up all the raw GHzs of all the CPUs, you end up with 3.4*2*250+2.6*1144=4674.4Ghz. Do you think 15000 1.2GHz P3 chips will have the performance equal or less to this number? My guestimation is: they should be at least two or three times faster.