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."

Comments

Re:Export restrictions?

[14erCleaner]

They've been eased over the years, e.g. here is a list of articles.

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.