Iannis Holwech
01-24-2010, 05:05 AM
For those that are interested in the rendering power behind the Avatar production;
Link;Processing AVATAR (http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/avatar_data_processing-10016774-1.html)
Information Management Newsletters, December 21, 2009
A thoroughbred of a data center at Weta Digital sits behind intense visual effects in the blockbuster movie and the creative artists who put it together.
Weta Digital is really a visual effects job shop that manages thousands of work orders of intense amounts of data. That preselects most of the fast, constant capacity equipment required. The data center used to process the effects for AVATAR is Weta’s 10,000 square foot facility, rebuilt and stocked with HP BL2x220c blades in the summer of 2008.
The computing core - 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines each - adds up to some 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. The blades read and write against 3 petabytes of fast fiber channel disk network area storage from BluArc and NetApp.
All the gear sits tightly packed and connected by multiple 10-gigabit network links. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need for our visual effects, and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local,” says Paul Gunn, Weta’s data center systems administrator.
Link;Processing AVATAR (http://www.information-management.com/newsletters/avatar_data_processing-10016774-1.html)
Information Management Newsletters, December 21, 2009
A thoroughbred of a data center at Weta Digital sits behind intense visual effects in the blockbuster movie and the creative artists who put it together.
Weta Digital is really a visual effects job shop that manages thousands of work orders of intense amounts of data. That preselects most of the fast, constant capacity equipment required. The data center used to process the effects for AVATAR is Weta’s 10,000 square foot facility, rebuilt and stocked with HP BL2x220c blades in the summer of 2008.
The computing core - 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines each - adds up to some 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. The blades read and write against 3 petabytes of fast fiber channel disk network area storage from BluArc and NetApp.
All the gear sits tightly packed and connected by multiple 10-gigabit network links. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need for our visual effects, and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local,” says Paul Gunn, Weta’s data center systems administrator.