Our CTO here at work ended up getting a tour of the render farm at Weta in NZ. It's kinda interesting how they setup the cooling for all of the blade servers/render clients. It all water cooled. Kinda neat.
The most amazing scene factory in Wellington – My visit to see how Avatar was created
What else can I write about Avatar that has not already been written in the mainstream media?
Success indeed has many fathers. Who does not want to be associated with the future of movies? I expect multiplicity of case studies, hundreds of blogs entries and lots of claims. Let me stake my claim to fame as the provider of the high performance Network Storage (NAS) on which Avatar was rendered. Many IT giants provided equipment to Weta Digital Data Center, we provided the “Ferraris” (to quote a Weta Digital person). When speed is everything, claiming top gear accolades is a source of pride indeed.
On December 10th, exactly one week before the release of Avatar, I followed the summer to Wellington.
I visited with Paul Ryan – Weta Digital’s CTO, Adam Shand who built this amazing data center, Matt Provost who manages the systems and their team mates for an interactive round table discussion focusing on Weta Digital’s challenges and ways for BlueArc to assist with future products and enhancements.
Following our roundtable technical brainstorming session (which will not get summarized in this blog entry ), Adam, Paul and Matt took me for a tour of the data center. Having engineering genes, my DNA does not provide for being easily impressed. I was impressed with this data center! Weta Digital’s data center is an extremely dense data center, which ranks in the top 200 of the top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. With such compute power and density the tour started at the cooling facility. The cooling facility is a marvel of engineering achievement and eco friendliness.
The racks are water cooled. The heat exchange is fully enclosed. Hot air is sucked into a radiator and cycled through the front of the systems. The heat exchange is passive and because of the prevailing low temperatures in Wellington, all that is needed is to run water pumps to get rid of the heat. The heat exchanges through evaporation which occurs on top of the facility depicted in the enclosed photo.
Adam proudly pointed out that Weta Digital retained a local contractor to design the cooling infrastructure, a local engineering firm which usually designs dairies. Apparently both milk and water are liquids that one who has the experience knows how to handle. Hat’s off to Weta Digital for energy efficiency.
Another anecdote I’ve learned while touring the facility was that the raised floor is 1.2 meter high, which is tall enough to contain all the water below the computer gear in the event of a catastrophic leak.
As I initially pointed out I have no doubt that the rest of the impressive gear will be covered by case studies and blog entries by the respective vendors. (And I doubt I will do them justice), so I just focused on what I did find to be the most impressive eco friendly energy efficient data center.
Serving all the 4,000 server blades and the multiple of thousands of submitted jobs per night, over 10 Gigabit Ethernet, are the NAS storage racks from BlueArc.
The load on the storage system is enormous. BlueArc NAS systems handled over 8 GB/Sec, while maintaining 24X7 high availability. (Unlike some other HPC batch processes, CGI rendering is made up of multiple individual rendering tasks which cannot be check pointed, thus failure is unacceptable). Paul defines the data center as a “scenes factory”.
A minute of Avatar equates to 17.28 GB. Multiply by the length of the movie which if I remember correctly is 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Go watch the movie!
What else can I write about Avatar that has not already been written in the mainstream media?
Success indeed has many fathers. Who does not want to be associated with the future of movies? I expect multiplicity of case studies, hundreds of blogs entries and lots of claims. Let me stake my claim to fame as the provider of the high performance Network Storage (NAS) on which Avatar was rendered. Many IT giants provided equipment to Weta Digital Data Center, we provided the “Ferraris” (to quote a Weta Digital person). When speed is everything, claiming top gear accolades is a source of pride indeed.
On December 10th, exactly one week before the release of Avatar, I followed the summer to Wellington.
I visited with Paul Ryan – Weta Digital’s CTO, Adam Shand who built this amazing data center, Matt Provost who manages the systems and their team mates for an interactive round table discussion focusing on Weta Digital’s challenges and ways for BlueArc to assist with future products and enhancements.
Following our roundtable technical brainstorming session (which will not get summarized in this blog entry ), Adam, Paul and Matt took me for a tour of the data center. Having engineering genes, my DNA does not provide for being easily impressed. I was impressed with this data center! Weta Digital’s data center is an extremely dense data center, which ranks in the top 200 of the top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers. With such compute power and density the tour started at the cooling facility. The cooling facility is a marvel of engineering achievement and eco friendliness.
The racks are water cooled. The heat exchange is fully enclosed. Hot air is sucked into a radiator and cycled through the front of the systems. The heat exchange is passive and because of the prevailing low temperatures in Wellington, all that is needed is to run water pumps to get rid of the heat. The heat exchanges through evaporation which occurs on top of the facility depicted in the enclosed photo.
Adam proudly pointed out that Weta Digital retained a local contractor to design the cooling infrastructure, a local engineering firm which usually designs dairies. Apparently both milk and water are liquids that one who has the experience knows how to handle. Hat’s off to Weta Digital for energy efficiency.
Another anecdote I’ve learned while touring the facility was that the raised floor is 1.2 meter high, which is tall enough to contain all the water below the computer gear in the event of a catastrophic leak.
As I initially pointed out I have no doubt that the rest of the impressive gear will be covered by case studies and blog entries by the respective vendors. (And I doubt I will do them justice), so I just focused on what I did find to be the most impressive eco friendly energy efficient data center.
Serving all the 4,000 server blades and the multiple of thousands of submitted jobs per night, over 10 Gigabit Ethernet, are the NAS storage racks from BlueArc.
The load on the storage system is enormous. BlueArc NAS systems handled over 8 GB/Sec, while maintaining 24X7 high availability. (Unlike some other HPC batch processes, CGI rendering is made up of multiple individual rendering tasks which cannot be check pointed, thus failure is unacceptable). Paul defines the data center as a “scenes factory”.
A minute of Avatar equates to 17.28 GB. Multiply by the length of the movie which if I remember correctly is 2 hours and 45 minutes.
Go watch the movie!
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