You might have noticed that folks at Weta Digital in Wellington have just been nominated for three Oscars . If not, have a look here. You might perhaps have wondered how it could be that New Zealand has developed such expertise. If so, place a note in your diary to attend our free public 2013 Gibbons Lectures in May - Picture This! Computer Graphics in New Zealand. Our annual lecture series on IT topics is in memory of our late colleague and Head of Department, Peter Gibbons. Read about past lecture topics here.
Yesterday it was rather hard to avoid The Hobbit's premiere in Wellington - but as computer scientists we're much more interested in the technology than in the red carpet. Weta Digital, Peter Jackson's FX company isn't camera shy but I've only been able to find this description of the infrastructure they deploy to make movies like LOTR, King Kong, Avatar and now The Hobbit. Adam Shand, former lead of Weta Digital’s infrastructure team describes Weta Digital's data centre using 35,000 CPU cores in its "renderwall" and 3,000TB of storage. The distributed Weta campus buildings are "connected with a minimum of redundant 10Gbps connections with 40Gbps EtherChannel trunks in any situation in which storage and the renderwall needed to talk to each other." A full description including architecture diagrams is provided by Shand in this NetApp blog post. Since this describes the infrastructure used for Avatar I guess Weta Digital will be more powerful today. In the video below Paul Gunn, of Weta Digital, describes their technology.
