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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 Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?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!
that's why the lights dim in Wellington when the cluster is rendering
Sad to say that the pr0n industry has ruined this movie title forever.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
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...
Things have improved since TRON
Except Jeff Bridges' acting
Hmm, how to get them on my SETI team....
In Soviet Russia, cluster grow you.
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
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Power of 1 PC: 250 Watts
Power of 15,000 PCs: Enough to power a small town
Ability to do math in your head: Priceless
For everything else, there's xcalc.
No wonder the film was so bad.
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-
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
I think it's sheep-power in New Zealand. And hey, after that, Hollywood can reuse them to fleece movie-goers.
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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.
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!
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.
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.
Edith Keeler Must Die
The problem is that CG is used so indiscriminately now. In the begining, it was only used to do things that you couldn't do any other way (like the living water in The Abyss or the T1000 morphs in Terminator 2). Now-a-days CG is used as a cost cutting measure to do things that could be done in a more traditional way but would cost a little more. I was watching Raiders of the Lost Ark the other day (which still looks great after 20+ years) and thinking, if they shot that movie today they would have just used CG instead of finding 1000 trained snakes, and it would look like crap.
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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 could reduce that with a little shear power
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Comparisons with Star Wars aren't helpful. King Kong has more fur. Rendering fur is hard work.
There is no easy way to compare that. It's highly subjective, even when using the most basic comparison: number of shots. I believe Ep. 3 had 2400+ shots in the final film, although about 2800+ were rendered (about 400 were edited out). Don't remember how many shots King Kong has, though I think it's at least 1,500 though less than 2400. Then you get to the subjective part. for both films how many shots have major 3D work, how many it's mostly compositing, roto and paint, how many are miniature mostly, how many are mixed more or less equaly, how many minutes of digital character animation, etc. So when discussing those issues it's usuallyt a good idea to get as specific as possible and even then you can argue both sides.
It's probably better to wait for the Cinefex issue in January.
http://www.cinefex.com/magazine/next/next.html
Am I the only one who prefers models and stop motion animation to the CGI garbage of the last 15 years?
It depends on the CG. If I don't notice that it's CG I tend to like it. If it looks like CG I tend to groan.
Jurassic park was extremely well done CG and I loved it. Spiderman was, well, cartoony at best (but a good story and Kirsten Dunst go a long way). In Gone in Sixty Seconds they should have just used real cars in all the scenes. There was no excuse for CG shenanegans. But the New York scene in AI was flawless and would have been impossible to film in scale models alone.
Notice a trend? If the director is a master of visuals and refuses to accept compromise (just try to tell Spielberg "that's the best I can do") then your CG is gonna work. If your level of visual excellence is better exemplified by Xena the Warrior Princess then you may just be willing to settle.
I don't mean to bash Raimi. I loved a lot of his stuff, including Spiderman. But did any of you really think Spiderman's level of CG excellence met the level of Spielberg? Directors and producers need to be more demanding of their digital special effects. They should reject mediocre work as readily as wire work with, well, visible wires.
TW
Available for hire eh? Uh yeah...lemme just pull out my checkbook ;-).
28:06:42:12 - That is when the world will end...
"...small enough to fit into a keyboard..."
Funny, my first computer fit in a keyboard (Atari 800XL) then the one after that (Amiga 500) then the one after that (Amiga 1200). wait a sec...
"lack of quality control is one of the pillars of slashdot"
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.