Weta spends big for better effects

By RICHARD WOOD

Weta Digital has bought 220 locally assembled servers over the past few months and placed an order for 256 more for graphics work on the Lord of the Rings movies.

Although Wellington-based Weta will not talk cost, industry sources say the 476 systems would be worth between $3 million and $4 million.

The machines are rack-mounted dual Xeon-processor systems operating at 2.2GHz with four gigabytes of memory each. The 950 processors will be added to 350 existing 1GHz Pentium 3 systems as part of a dedicated "render wall" comprising 22 racks.

The system allows artists to render textures, shading and resolution of scenes in an iterative process. The faster they can do that the better the pictures.

The latest server order is understood to be one of the largest Xeon-processor orders Intel has filled and it is thought the server farm will be the most powerful processing site in the Southern Hemisphere.

The deal has been a boost for the local assembly market, with an Intel spokesman citing spin-offs in server building experience and credibility. Christchurch-based Insite, a subsidiary of IT distributor Renaissance, built the machines. Wellington-based integrator Digital Video Technologies supplied the machines to Weta.

Weta Digital IT chief Scott Houston said the suppliers had provided significant bang per buck and joined in the passion of the project.

"We've had great support from DVT, Insite and Intel that has allowed us to buy more servers than we anticipated."

Houston said Weta chose the local boxes because the firm needed to maximise its processor density.

Insite builds the two processor machines in a one-unit size box, which is 4.4cm high. That allows Weta to put 64 processors on each rack.

The servers primarily run Renderman software from Pixar on a Red Hat Linux operating system. A product called Grunt has been developed in house by Jon Allitt, which is used to render large crowd animation scenes.

Houston said a key challenge of the deal had been getting the servers delivered and installed to meet the production deadlines. It was taking about three weeks to get them up and running.

The servers run in parallel and major jobs are broken down for each server. It is networked together with 100Mbps ethernet and Foundry networking switches.

Houston said he was getting a couple of CVs a day from people wanting to join the 30-strong IT team and more than 90 had responded to a recent job advertisement.

Weta has been quiet on its use of technology after a deal with IBM this year was misreported around the world at around US$10 million. Sources now suggest it was more like a tenth of that price.

The IBM Linux-based machines now number 200 and are used as workstations. They are IBM Intellistations with 2.2GHz processors and 2Gb of memory.

Artists have 24-hour access at the Weta site using 360 workstations.

Houston said some had two machines at their desks and had been known to still be there at 5.30 on a Sunday morning, making technical alterations to the system challenging.