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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 Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?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
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....
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.
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
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.
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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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