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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."
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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In 2002 it was upped to 195,000 million theoretical operations per second, and the limit goes up automatically every six months. A typical PC in 2002 was 2000 MTOPs, so this allows export of some rather big honking systems.
Have you read my blog lately?
IANAL, but, as I understand it, with the shipping restrictions, they only apply with shipping those computers to certain companies. If you were shipping to, say, North Korea, Iran, or any number of potentially third-world dictatorships, then you'd probably have problems. However, if you're shipping to Austraila or New Zealand, you probably wouldn't have any problems.
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
The 250 added blade servers each have two 3.4 GHz CPus, while the existing 1144 only had two 2.6 GHz CPUs.
Every two new servers is approx. as powerful as three old servers. It is more like they are now running 1519 dual 2.4 Ghz machines, or 3038 2.4 GHz cores.
Also, remember that a 2.4 GHz is faster than two 1.2 Ghz chips, because of instruction set improvements.
So, I would not say it would be far off to say that this cluster is approx. the computing power of 15,000 1 - 1.5 GHz machines. This is probably what they are basing the numbers off of.
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.
a nimstudio1/
An interesting article on building a digital animation studio (IBM) is here:
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/library/wa-
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Those numbers are misleadingly wrong. Star Wars Episode III was rendered between the old ILM location and the new Presidio facility. The Presidio has about 4000 processors used for rendering, while old ILM had about 2,500 processors. The data center of the Presidio came online (I think) late last year. So frames from Ep. 3 and The Island were rendered both at the Presidio and old ILM. So surely ILM rendered Ep. 3 on a few thousand processors.
I think the misleading part is that some articles stated that the initial order for AMD Opteron based machines for the data center was 140 processors. But their renderfarm is crtainly 4,000 procs which I think includes about 1,000 workstations that are used for overnight rendering.
Data Center Gets Star Treatment
Also while ILM does have an Opteron based renderfarm they run Linux on them, not Windows64 beta.
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.
ignorance is bliss. googlefiberatx.com
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.
It's not as if it's some desperate idea from the studio. Jackson has wanted to remake King Kong since he was a kid. He tried to make it before LOTR - but Miramax yanked it because there were too many monster movies that season. Now he gets to make it with a much bigger budget and a better cast.
Do you yknow the original? It's campy as all hell, and I expect Jackson's will be too. It's not going to be just another monster movie.