"If something doesn't exist, we'll make it"
Over the holidays, I took my daughter to see a movie about a Cajun frog. I admit to a pang of jealousy as I passed crowds lined up for screenings of "Avatar". However, given my situation -- namely a 5-year-old clamoring for popcorn and a Princess movie -- I made the best choice for my needs.
It turns out those Avatar-watching throngs got to see the result of another best choice; one made by a group of IT experts in Miramar, New Zealand.
Weta is an Academy Award-winning studio that did the digital effects for Avatar. The imaginations at Weta Digital have created some incredible virtual realities. Jim Ericson from Information Management quotes Weta's Paul Gunn as explaining that 'if it's something that doesn't exist, we'll make it.' Pretty amazing innovations coming from a relatively small place on the other side of the world from Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
In an article and blog, Jim sketches for us the 4000-server facility Weta used to render the VFX of the blockbuster. One eye-opener: the final output from this behemoth server farm fits on a single hard drive.
Weta's space- and power-constrained facility uses advanced techniques like blades and water cooling. Performance is a paramount need –so much so that their server clusters comprise seven of the world's 500 largest supercomputers. But their workloads didn't just need massive scalability, they also required high bandwidth between individual server nodes, and relatively local storage.
As Jim points out, they chose to build their infrastructure with HP BladeSystem, using the double-dense BL2x220c server blade. This very innovative, compact server (shown in the video below) let them achieve, in their words, 'greater processing density than anything else found on the market'.
Actually, any engineer could stick 64 Intel® Xeon® processors into a 17-inch-high box and get it to run. However, very few computer companies have the expertise -- and resources -- to make such a thing affordable and efficient, and to be able to warranty that it will run without pause for 3+ years.
Even more important: Weta possessed something relatively rare when they chose HP BladeSystem. They were already experts in bladed architectures. Their prior infrastructure was based on IBM blade servers, so they already expected the space- and power-saving benefits of blades. Weta was seeking the best bladed architecture. And Weta determined that, for them, HP BladeSystem was the best choice.
