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

Export restrictions?

[BWJones]

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 Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?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.

Re:Export restrictions?

[Hey Pope Felcher . .]

. . . export restrictions are generally overcome by the all mighty dollar, and besides hasn't New Zealand merged with Hollywood now?

More interestingly, can anyone see digital actors quickly surpassing their organic cousins, no matter what Peter Jackson says?

And slightly more interestingly, when will New Zealand surpass California in flim making, it is the ideal location, with better light, more interesting geography, and (at the moment) far cheaper to work in. There are of course the problems with the remoteness of the location, but with the rapidly shrinking world cliché, this is surely no longer such a problem, especially with the work Mr. Jackson is putting in regarding the logistics.

Re:Blah

[sleeper0]

How do you combine 1644 server class ~3ghz CPUss and end up with the power of 15,000 PCs? Only in the marketing department...

Re:power draw

[shokk]

Seriously, I would love to see an article, not on what their render farm is like, but on what their power management for it is like. Do they use remote-managed power strips or are they all just popped in, hoping that they don't blow a fuse. How many UPSs do they have and what kind of on-battery runtime do they shoot for?

What kind of power draw do the blade chassis have? What blades? What version of Red Hat?!?!?!

Unfortunately TFA is very short on details and reads more like "Peter Jackson went out and bought 500 computers! Woo!"