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ILM's Datacenter
kylegordon writes "CGW has inside scoop on Industrial Light and Magic's facilities after they moved from San Rafeal to San Franciscos Presidio. With 3000 disks, it can shift 170Tb to 5000 rendernodes over 10GbE and 1GbE network links. It's an impressive system, for impressive films."
I bet I could make a graph that represents how the quality of movies is characteristically inversely proportionate to the amount of CGI effects in them. Oftentimes, eye candy is used to shroud the plot and mask the bad acting/directing. American audiences especially just go looking for explosion sequences and CGI in the annual summer action flick hunt. We often fear a movie that might prove to be too cerebral and that pretty much disgusts me. Way to reinforce bad movies that are only good for one viewing with volume set to 'loud' and TV set to 'huge.'
ILM is responsible for making movies like The Mask (of which there are seven films) and characters like Jar-Jar Binks possible. Be sure to thank them for that.
My work here is dung.
Way to go, guys! Who would have known that a small startup from Pittsburgh with some killer engineers, could make it into ILM's datacenter. Hi, Gus!
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
According to Mapquest a trip from San Rafeal to San Francisco would take about 35 minutes (Est. Distance: 21.06 miles). Therefore, if I loaded up all 170TB on a truck my effective bandwidth would be about 3.06e28 bps (or roughly 3e16 Tbps). Once again for huge data repositories there is no substitute for shipping physical media.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
Okay... not everything they do is shit. That, and CG doesn't make movies worse... only if it sucks. You can go watch claymation if you would like.
http://www.ilm.com/ilm_services.html
Look at all they have done. While some of the stuff on there may have sucked... there is some really fucking good stuff on there.
Also, if I remember correctly, they were some of the first to experiment with particle renders for CG (they used it in the Mask to create some of the storm/tornado transformations). Anyways... thats all aside from the point
Hey... more power to em. They get cooler stuff, they make more realistic CGs. And when all you nay-sayers are watching a movie, and don't notice a good CG... it has worked, and they have won. Don't fight CG now, soon it will just look like everything else.
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Nice setup you have there ILM. Its a shame if something should happen to it ;)
Yes they have, are you an idiot? Do you think that Star Wars movies are the only movies ILM puts out?
r iters
hello?!?!?!?!?
"Raiders of the Lost Ark"? is a GREAT movie.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082971/fullcredits#w
Go down to Visual Effects, notice the big ILM after each of their names.....
I bet I could make a graph that represents how the quality of movies is characteristically inversely proportionate to the amount of CGI effects in them. Oftentimes, eye candy is used to shroud the plot and mask the bad acting/directing. American audiences especially just go looking for explosion sequences and CGI in the annual summer action flick hunt. We often fear a movie that might prove to be too cerebral and that pretty much disgusts me.
OK, here's the thing. Movies that are "cerebral" and thought-provoking don't draw people to theaters. I see previews for a movie like "Sixth Sense" or "Se7en," and I say to myself, "renter." Studios make more money by drawing us to the theater, and the way they do that is by making movies that benefit most from the big-screen, big-sound environment of your local megaplex. Usually, that means "action flick."
And it turns out they're right. Look at the biggest moneymakers. They're not the "Good Will Huntings" and the "Brokeback Mountains." The summer blockbusters are the "Spider-mans" and "X-Men" and "Independence Day" and "Star Wars."
Regarding your other point, about using CGI to mask bad directing, etc., I can only half-agree. While movies like "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace" certainly used CGI as a crutch, don't you agree that at least the CGI was good? Don't you agree it would have been an even worse movie if the CGI had been terrible? Look at "Air Force One." Decent movie, spoiled by absolutely terrible special effects at the end. Or how about "King Kong." Great movie, that benefitted from good CGI. Same with "Titanic."
Good CGI can make a terrible film bearable, or a good film great.
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I ALWAYS notice CGI.
No you don't. You think you do, but you don't. When you do notice it, you point it out and say to yourself, "that was so obvious, CGI sucks." But when you don't notice it, you don't realize that what you're looking at is CGI. You think it's real. You think the man really has had his legs amputated ("Forrest Gump") or Arnie really did jump his motorcycle off a 15 foot ramp ("Terminator 2"). CGI is used all over the place in movies now, not just for the big explosions that still may not look 100% convincing (however, it's much better than stop-motion animation).
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
That's a funny question because I used to work at ILM's (San rafael, much less shiny) lab, benchmarking raids, including the first version of the IBM shark. At that time we came to the conclussion that the IBM raid was reliable, and reasonably fast, but the price was so far out of line, that it wasn't a real contender.
The shark, and many of the high-end raids, are really designed around transaction oriented applications (databases). ILM's application are classic video codes, which work better on a classic raid5, than they do on the data-sprinkler style raids like the shark, eva, clariion, etc. Netapp makes pretty decent storage boxes, and they're highly configurable, so I'm sure they have them fine tuned to the apps' preffered i/o size.
Furthermore, the nas/san has more to do with the spinaker software than the raid of choice. Back when I worked there, ILM was testing cluster sollutions, but the renderfarm was a bunch of sgi origins. The storage was hung off of a couple of 8-way irix boxes, and pushed around with NFS. Since then they've upped their compute capacity by a factor of 30, there's no way they'd be able to do all that I/O with NFS to a couple of big servers. The san setup lets them distribute the NFS load to a large number of servers, all sharing access to the storage on a san. A lot of other cluster filesystems allow this too.
From the benchmarking I've done of these types of storage clusters, you don't get the same single stream performance as you do from a big-iron server setup, but the aggregate across a large number of nodes is pretty good. Managing the mess, and reliability can be problematic. I've never used spinaker, but I've used almost all the other products in this space, and they're all in the "pretty good" category. My current favorite is apple's xsan, because it is really inexpensive, and so is the hardware.
Still, there was Jurassic Park, which had that wow effect, but only in a suburban, sterilized kind of way. Maybe it was just the seventies with their more "adult", less megaplexy, disney-fashioned attitudes. The one company that embodies that spirit of combining new tech with a fresh attitude is obviously Pixar. They still have their mojo intact. We also have tons of great political films, clever films and documentaries coming out nowadays, so there is no reason to despair in the times per se, I was just thinking of ILM specifically. Maybe George will lose that weird suburban Disneyfied taste of his at some point and get back to some Thx1138 type goodness.
Why have 5000 render nodes when you could virtualise with 250 physical processors running 20 apiece?
I've tried bluearc. It works alright, though not as well as the whitepapers say. This is true of most everything, though. What really pissed me off about bluearc is the pre-sales engineers who seemed to have drunk a whole hell of a lot of the company coolaid. The whole story is that the filesystem is "implemented all in hardware", so it's really fast, and that should solve all your problems.
Well, I've been around the block enough times to know that no filesystem is actually implemented in hardware. They may have allocations done on the disk drives like Object-Disks, or they may have the transaction model built into the network protocol, but nobody is burning filesystem asics. If they are, I wouldn't buy one. Even local filesystems take decades to work out the bulk of the bugs. If you remember the EFS to XFS transition on irix, you know what I'm talking about.
The Bluearcs are fine, the people I had to deal with were just full of themselves. They seemed completely convinced they had come up with something that had never been done before, and that it was gonna knock my socks off. Except I'd been there, done that, and knew about how much it should cost. I've never installed a site with bluearc, but it's been a contender several times.