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Inside the Lucasfilm datacenter
passthecrackpipe writes "Where can you find a (rhetorical) 11.38 petabits per second bandwidth? It appears to be inside the Lucasfilm Datacenter. At least, that is the headline figure mentioned in this report on a tour of the datacenter. The story is a bit light on the down-and-dirty details, but mentions a 10 gig ethernet backbone (adding up the bandwidth of a load of network connections seems to be how they derived the 11.38 petabits p/s figure. In that case, I have a 45 gig network at home.) Power utilization is a key differentiator when buying hardware, a "legacy" cycle of a couple of months, and 300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter. To me, the story comes across as somewhat hyped up — "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing, "look how cool we are". Over the last couple of years, I have been in many datacenters, for banks, pharma and large enterprise to name a few, that have somewhat larger and more complex setups."
Only a few boxen are used rendering and effects. The rest is to track and calculate sales of Star Wars merchandise.
Is that all? Most datacenters that house more than 1 large customer usually starts at about 300tb, nothing to write home about. Most customers using sap use a lot more.
I'll just assume it runs linux. Did it say in TFA?
I don't mean use the search engine, I mean drop the expense of rack cases and server boards for their render nodes. Google just velcro a bunch of cheap hardware to a shelf. If ILM did this, they'd get 2 nodes for the price of a 19" rack case alone.
There are many corporate data centers larger and more powerful than that, it is much more impressive if the entire thing can run one giant application. Still, I'm pretty sure that Google's new datacenter wipes its ass with a datacenter the size of this one.
stuff |
San Diego Super Computing Center (SDSC) has 2 Petabytes of online Storage with 400TB for researchers. They have 18PB of archival tape storage.
a tures/print.php/3634881
Still....I like datacenters. The hum of equipment. 65 degree temps and lower. I once had my cube re-located to a tape library. Quiet...peaceful place
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/hardware/fe
Is that the speed you can talk at?
A rhetorical question does not expect an answer...
...so maybe "rhetorical bandwidth" is a nice way of saying that the data flows only in one direction? ;-)
...would post this as a news item. Front page, too.
Let's break this down submission down..
"Hi. I found this article on the web that totally didn't impress me, I think they fiddled with the numbers to make themselves look better than they are, and overall I really couldn't give a shite."
Yes. Obvious front page material for a Sunday!
300TB of storage in a 10.000 square foot datacenter
Can fit 300TB in a single rack these days.. or is that a 10 square foot datacenter?
Well passthecrackpipe, if you and your vast knowledge of large scale datacenters are not impressed with the story, why the hell did you submit it?
How do they Archive the movies? TFA mentions that Pirates of the Caribbean was 60tb.
I work with post production for short, independent movies. I have my main RAID where I keep the movies while I work.
After it's done, I archive the TIFF image sequence (that goes to transfered into film) in a HD. It's probably hard to archive 60tb. Do they just throw away the digital copy?
10.000 square feet for a datacenter is not very impressive. The datacenter that I work in did a relatively modest 100,000 square foot EXPANSION which was the result of absorbing an adjoining atrium. I suspect that the power equipment and air handlers may take up 10,000 square feet.
What a fucking waste.
George Lucas has jumped the shark.
Then the shark ate him. Then shit him out. The shit washed up on a beach, dried out in the sun, and was pissed on by a dog.
and format it?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
"Still, I'm pretty sure that Google's new datacenter wipes its ass with a datacenter the size of this one."
And the NSA datacenter can pick it's teeth with the Google datacenter.
So why submit this if you don't like it? Why not at least title it "Lucasfilm thinks it's soooo great."? I'm sure you've seen bigger data centers, and you can type 500 lines of code a minute, and maybe you defeated a ninja in hand-to-hand combat, but for the rest of us "normal" nerds it's still neat to read about the machines that get the work done in a business. Of course it's hyped up, it's a press release disguised as news. Take it for what it is, relax, and try to imagine those 2,000 servers in a secret cave under your house, manipulating the stock market in your favor. That's what I do.
How about theoretical? *yawn*
Why all the negativity toward Lucas? Jar Jar's dead man, let it go. George said he was sorry already. I think it's a good story. It's absolutely fascinating to me to see how they make movies today, how much data gets pushed around, and how they make sure that the creative people have access to what they need, when they need it. And they do all this to support incredible time schedules, with boatloads of cash riding on every second. I don't know how anyone can say that this isn't an impressive operation. As for Lucas thinking they are so great... well, they pretty much are. I'd say that being organization that created the special effects for tons of blockbuster movies and being nominated for several major movie industry awards pretty much gives them some bragging rights.
300TB storage and 11 petabits/s bandwidth.
This means
A) they can push their entire storage through the network in 300*8Tb/(11Pb/s)=200ms.
or
B) the article author does not have a clue.
I think an anlogy would be: I drive back and forth to work everyday, or 400 times a year. My speed on each trip is 60mph, so in a year my speed is 60x400 or 24000mph.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Guess they have not been to a hospital data center yet. Should check out someone like dow chemical.
barf
As in reference to THX 1138?
Of course, it could just be a coincidence.
I've got a fever and the only prescription is more COBOL.
I have to wonder how many systems they have? They accomplish a great deal with what is a fairly small area. I would guess that they each computer has major ram and is simply NFSed back to a central server.
What I have found funny is the number of ppl who are speaking of how big their centers. Offhand, I tend to suspect that those centers could go on a MAJOR f%^&ing diet and need to have their budgets cut to a fifth. And finally, it is time to fire a bunch of the incompetents who can not run a tight center.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Back when cavebadgers were common pets and mascots, they kept the mainframe rooms pretty chilly. All those glaciers and stuff ya'know. The electric bill was cheaper then, too.
...running FC6 x64.
Why? Because my rig has never so much as contained - much less rendered - an image of Jar Jar Binks.
Pwned.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
The datacenter at one of my employer's satellite sites has four CLARiiONs, at 2 racks each, a 5-bay DMX-3, and a 4-bay XP1024, for 380TB raw, in 3,200 sqft, along with thirty racks of servers, a P595 mainframe, and several multi-rack computing clusters. There's plenty of cooling and it's really not THAT crowded. Managing to pack 10-12 racks of storage into a 10,000 sqft data center is not anything noteworthy.
Now I'm disappointed. I had hoped Masi Oka would be working there.
Not every application scales out as well as google, retard. Google gets millions of requests per second that take relatively little computing power per request to process. In a two hour movie there are only (24 frames/second)*(60 seconds/minute)*(60 minutes/hour)*(2 hours)=172,800 frames to render out, but at a resolution of 4096x2160 pixels, each frame takes a while to generate.
When you have to push around so much uncompressed image data, subdividing the rendering of each frame into work for several servers doesn't make sense because then you have to handle all the image data twice: once to render each piece, and again to send the pieces to another node and assemble them into a full frame. With the millions of dollars ILM has at their disposal, they probably have people on staff doing analysis more thorough than your google-fanboy handwaving. Why don't you shut your mouth unless you actually have a clue.
This is the Lucasfilm datacenter. That number finds its way into all sorts of Lucas-related material.
Will it run Vista? Sounds like they might need to upgrade!
Does anybody else find it questionable that he said Pirates of the Caribbean required approx. 50TB of storage, and the next one will require 25% more....but then goes on to say that there is total storage space of 300TB in the data center. Thats basically enough to store six movies of equivalent size to Pirates, so where are all the rest of the movies they make stored??
There's considerable unhappiness in San Francisco about Lucasfilm's operation. It's in the Presidio, which used to be a military base and is now a national park. It's the only national park which has to make a profit, due to a Bush Administration deal. Letterman Army Hospital was torn down to make room for the Lucasfilm facility. The San Francisco Bay Guardian complains about this constantly, as they try to keep the Presidio from turning into an industrial park. The Lucasfilm move to the Presidio was something of a dot-com boom excess, when people thought SF was the place to be.
Pixar, in Emeryville, Tippett, in Berkeley, and Dreamworks, in Redwood City, are the innovative animation companies in the Bay Area. And of course, there's EA, SCEA, and some other game companies. Lucasfilm doesn't seem to get much attention.
There are data centers in San Francisco proper with far more storage, too. The Internet Archive has several petabytes of storage. There's a large colocation facility at the 6th St. offramp from I-280.
They wanted me to move across the continent from a place with average cost of living and a 10 minute commute to work in San Francisco (right in the city, not even an outlying area) for about a 15% increase in pay. The only way I could afford that would be to take on a 2-3 hour commute and even then I'd have to run an even tighter ship, financially speaking, than I do now.
I suppose they were counting on the "cool factor". The job was cool, but not so cool I was willing to stick a stake through the heart of my family. Right after this, I read that Lucas donates 170 million to his alma mater. Hey George, why not donate 10% less and actually pay your people something more since you're insisting on setting up shop right in the freaking Presidio?
600 Tbyte of disk in total can't be right. I wrote an application a couple years ago that has 6 terabytes of disk allocated to it to cache its work. This was for a single app. Admittedly, we worked with fairly big data files where I was working, but I've got to think Lucasfilm's files are way larger than my 1-2 gig files.
The majority of Lucasfilm's processing power is used for Graphics generation for ILM (unlike say Google). I think the hidden message of this article is they could get a huge screen and projector, play, for example, Crysis on full settings including 64x Antialiasing and Anisotropic Filtering, at 4320p with 22.2 surround sound and say to Sony, "Thats TrueHD!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHDV
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22.2
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I guess that depends on what the internal temperature of the machines will be at the hotest parts of the day. If the AC and outside thermal insulation isn't up to snuff, you might need to go into a day with some pretty cold temperatures just so your servers stay viable, heat-wise by the end of the day.
As somebody who (ab)uses that particular rig daily, the article misses the point about what's so awesome about the system.
It's a good sized datacenter, but what it's able to support in processing ability is the impressive part, and that the fat bandwidth runs at capacity almost all of the time by the demands of processing jobs. Proprietary software doles out jobs 24/7 to thousands of procs all over campus-- including artists' desktop machines-- for heavy duty computation: rendering and simulation and whatever it takes.
I can't imagine a facility where so many people are creating and pumping so much data around.
I toured their new facility in San Francisco. They have over 300 10Gbps ports and all PCs are connected via gigabit. Their datacenter was 2/3 full of dual-Opteron servers running SuSE Linux (though they were considering switching). Their server room was spotless. No cables were visible anywhere, but I did see a Roomba moving about the floor. The fellow who ran it said that since they're ILM, they have to have droids.
The facility was absolutely beautiful. When going between two buildings on an overhead walkway I saw the Golden Gate bridge with a nice orange sunset behind it. I wish I had my camera with me.
They said that they have many dedicated OC-48 pipes to various studios and can handle just about any format, since every studio uses their own format. They convert it to their own internal format, which I believe they open sourced.
When they moved from Skywalker Ranch, it was completely seamless. They had an OC-192 (10gbps) link running between the old and new facility as more and more equipment was migrated to the new facility but people continued to work at the old one.
-Aaron
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The point of the story was to display ILM data crunching power as impressive for a POST PRODUCTION house. Not "the greatest data center in the world". Compared to any other post production house, ILM is pretty darn impressive.
Nevermind the fact that there are much larger and complex setups out there, as others have pointed out. Nevermind the fact that Star Wars was a ripoff of a Japanese pulp science fiction novel.
Theoretical bandwidth is a chimera. All the cars on Los Angelos freeways at a given time, carrying boxes of tapes -- now that's some theoretical bandwidth. What matters is achieved write and read capacity -- I believe the record is 14.5 Gb/s sustained.
"Still....I like datacenters. The hum of equipment. 65 degree temps and lower. I once had my cube re-located to a tape library. Quiet...peaceful place"
So's a cemetary, but you don't see people willing moving in there.
TFA talks about 2000 servers equipped with 10 Gbps network cards.
11.38 Pbps is 11380 Tbps or 11380000 Gbps. This means that each
server has 569 network interfaces !! This is total bullshit. If
they had said they had 10*2000*2 = 40 Tbps, it would have been
based on more real (though irrelevant) data.
I hate it when ignorant journalists post meaningless data for public
consumption.
Willy
"as somewhat hyped up -- "look at us, we have a large datacenter" kind of thing,..."
And just what kind of statement *did* you expect from a Lucas operation? Have you learned nothing from his movies, grasshopper?
We techies really sux at Negotiations. Sadly, the more hard core you are, the less business savey we appear to be. I have been stuck around 100K. A friend of mine with less education and experience was offered a job at MS. He was originally offered 85K (this was 8 years ago). He said no and held out for 150K, stock options, and benefits. They came around and re-offered him. I do not know exactly what it was (per contract, he was not allowed to say), but he says that it was more than what he wanted. After seeing the house that he picked up in the Seattle area, I believe him. For all I know, he had MS give him the down payment for it.
Considering the team that he was on, I was more surprised that he was offered so low at first, but that is what business ppl do. We all have to learn when and how to negotiate better. Perhaps CS/CE should take up classes on this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is LucasFilm, not "SucksBecauseWereCheapFilm", so they probably run OS X, God's own operating system. Faster and more secure than Lin-sux.
Judging by your post. You know no knowledge of running anything other than you own computer. They are using NetApp storage and uptime are critical so it matters what you choose to put in your datacenter.
Am I the only one catching stuff like this?
"4000 frames, each frame took 23 hours to render..."
MEANING ((4000*23)/24)/365 = 10.5 years????
Wow, they must have a time machine there too. Seeing as the film in question, Poseidon, was released last year.
I can just see it now...
George Lucas: Any attack made by the Media against this data-center would be a useless gesture, no matter what technical data they have obtained. This station is now the ULTIMATE POWER in the universe. I suggest we use it.
Old-School Star Wars Fan: Don't be too proud of this technological terror you've constructed. The ability to destroy a prequel trilogy is insignificant next to the power of losing respect from millions of Star Wars fans.
Though anything in the SF Bay Guardian should be taken with a grain of salt, it should be noted that publication blames now-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) for the Presidio arrangement, not the Bush-41 Administration. Since the legislation was passed during the Clinton-42 administration, blaming it on either Bush is farfetched.
But the course taken wasn't unreasonable. The Presidio was already developed when it was a military base. Turning it into a traditional, naturalist national park would have required un-development, destroying pre-existing housing, buildings and roads. (Restoring it to its native grassy sand dunes would have required deforestation.) Mixing updates of the prior development with other expansion of public use and re-naturalization made sense -- and given the immense value of just the already-developed real estate, having the whole project pay its own way should have been a no-brainer.
Care to mention which Japanese pulp sci-fi novel was ripped off? Just curious.
Imageworks has almost twice as much gear as they have. They are just blowing smoke out there ass.
* This thread is useless without pics! *
We want our nerd porn!
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
The temptation to hit the EPO (emergency power off) button so they could experience the "dark side" must be too tempting.
Right after this, I read that Lucas donates 170 million to his alma mater. Hey George, why not donate 10% less and actually pay your people something more since you're insisting on setting up shop right in the freaking Presidio?
He could have invested that same 10% in the world's best script writer for the Prequels and thereby realized a 10x ROI from now-former-fanboys actually buying the DVD's of his movies and thereby able to both raise pay and donate more money. But ego is a terrible vice.
This from a guy who wrote his college entrance essay on George Lucas and wanted to work for ILM (before he got smart and grew up).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)