$5m boost to trilogy's finale

By ADAM GIFFORD

Peter Jackson's special-effects company Weta Digital is reaching deep into its chest of high-tech sword and sorcery to complete the final instalment of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Return of the King.

It has just taken delivery of 588 IBM blade servers, each with two 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors, in a deal which on list prices would be approaching $5 million.

"IBM were particularly aggressive on their pricing.

"We are very pleased with the relationship we have with them," said Weta Digital chief technical officer Scott Houston.

Houston said the seven racks of blade servers, when added to Weta's existing 15-rack server cluster, would make up the largest Intel-based high- performance computer site in the world with more than 2000 linked processors.

The cluster is used to render the frames drawn by the animators, adding texture and colour and meshing it in with the live footage.

"The first film had about 400 special effects shots. The second had 800 and this film will have at least as many as the first two combined," Houston said.

"We need this new gear for increased performance and the increased complexity of some of the shots Peter [Jackson] is asking us to consider.

"If you remember the book, in this film there two giant battles, there are armies of the dead, there is the fight with Shelob the spider and of course lots more of Gollum."

Unlike most post-production houses which bid for work and pay for equipment out of that price, New Line Cinema bankrolls the technology Weta Digital needs to complete its task.

"New Line understands Peter's vision and understands it is bound by technology, so it makes sure technology is not a bottleneck," Houston said. "In the big scheme, a few million dollars for a couple of thousand processors will pay dividends."

Houston said one of Weta's biggest problems was the lack of space, which prompted the move to blade servers - slim units containing processors and memory which slide into a separate chassis containing power units, fans, floppy drives, switches and connections to the other servers.