Slashdot Mirror
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 Was it repealed or is it just commonly ignored?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.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Clearly we need a Beowulf cluster to slay this gigantic King Kong cluster!
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
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
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.
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.