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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."
Clearly we need a Beowulf cluster to slay this gigantic King Kong cluster!
Many Bothans died to bring you this sig.
that's why the lights dim in Wellington when the cluster is rendering
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.
Have you read my blog lately?
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...
No wonder the film was so bad.