10,000 Square Foot Data Center Plays Role in Avatar
10,000 Square Foot Data Center Plays Role in Avatar
Posted 01/19/2010 at 5:19am
| by Paul Lilly
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If you haven't seen it yet, the movie Avatar crams a ton of special effects in a futuristic landscape, and it owes some of that magic to a data center nestled in Miramar, New Zealand.
According to Weta Digital, the visual effects company tasked with creating the images in James Cameron's flick, each minute of Avatar consumed some 17.28GB of data.
For that kind of processing power, Weta Digital tapped into a 10,000 sq. ft. server farm filled with 34 racks and over 4,000 Hewlett-Packard blade servers. According to Paul Gunn, the data center's system admin, the computing core includes about 35,000 processors and 104TB of RAM.
Image Credit: dvice.com
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bittertruth
January 22, 2010 at 5:53pm
I watched this movie twice and want to watch it in 3D. No matter, what they did, they put their hardwork and resources on it. The magnitude of the resources!!!!, I can see that. Very well done movie, I'll always adore this movie.
Those 9-10 foot talls were the most magificient one.. :)
_Jono_
January 20, 2010 at 12:41am
To be honest a couple gigs for an entire minute of film doesnt sound
all too special. 60 high resolution images are in a single second and
probably double that amount for 3D. I'm more impressed with how and
what the effects were rendered with than how much space it took up.
Biceps
January 19, 2010 at 11:25am
If you think 35,000 processor cores and 104 TB of RAM is 'awesome', then you should see my new laptop!
thematejka
January 19, 2010 at 10:21am
In my theater they charge us the same flat rate all the time :D
praetor_alpha
January 19, 2010 at 3:17pm
Can we ban people who say this?
ITS A DATACENTER, IT DOESN'T.
bear
January 19, 2010 at 8:37am
Not to play devil's advocate or anything, but I was rather disappointed in the 3D. In my opinion it couldn't justify the 30% premium over regular admission, especially since the 3D felt more like it was tacked on as an afterthought instead of being intended to be shown in 3D. I thought the movie was good, but to require so much power to store a single minute of footage...it's almost disgustingly wasteful as the 3D just didn't suck me in.
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Caboose
January 19, 2010 at 9:49am
Wasteful? Maybe if it was stored on a medium that could not be re-used many times over. I think that the CGI in the film was amazingly done. Photo-realistic CGI. CGI in general has come a LONG way since the days of Tron and The Last Starfighter (who here remembers that movie? You win a cookie if you do!). Eventually we'll get to the point where actors are simply guys wearing greenscreen motion tracking suits, and everything is all done in a computer. Or even sans motion capture, and 100% CGI!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
Colt725
January 19, 2010 at 10:51am
Yea I remember both movies. You know there is a TRON 2.0 movie (tenative title) due out later this year.
nsvander
January 19, 2010 at 1:23pm
I thought that Tron2.0 was not scheduled till 2011 for a release date. Has it been pushed up? Not that I care much, the you cannot top the graphics of the oginal, it was like watching my atari with real people in it.
Shrody
January 19, 2010 at 8:13am
That is an obscene amount of system requirements, I wish I had that setup in my basement.
Colt725
January 19, 2010 at 7:41am
- I saw the movie in 3D, TWICE. I was drawn into it and it had the appearance of being a real world. Good job no make that an awesome job Weta Digital.
Caboose
January 19, 2010 at 9:46am
The movie contained 40% live action, and 60% photo-realistic CGI!
-= I don't want to be dead, I want to be alive! Or... a cowboy! =-
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