Avatar 3D – The Hardware Behind The Movie

Most of you are probably aware of James Cameron’s latest creation, Avatar, and some of you might also have watched it in 3D. If you haven’t, go do it before it’s too late, it’s really a great movie, despite the story not being the most original.

The company behind the graphics in Avatar is Weta Digital from New Zealand. Information Management (a website) went to visit Weta Digital to get a glance at what kind of hardware setup is needed for a movie like Avatar 3D.

They have a server room of 930 square meters with 34 rack towers filled with HP BL2x220c blade servers. Combined, a total of 40,000 cores and 104 terabyte worth of memory. All the servers are connected to a storage system from NetApp and BluArc, able to hold 3 petabytes worth of data.

The servers are connected with several 10 Gbps network and the cooling system is water based and from Rittal. Thanks to all the servers within Weta Digital, they are the proud owners of several spots on the top 500 list over supercomputers.

9 thoughts on “Avatar 3D – The Hardware Behind The Movie”

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  5. Talk about supercomputers! Awesome hardware. I wish I could have a computer with 1/1000 the power/capacity of those computers. Hehe
    .-= Jaypee´s last blog ..HowTo: Rip DVDs with VLC Media Player =-.

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  6. I plan on seeing Avatar this weekend, I have heard and read so much about it that I am going to have to cave and go see it. I hate the idea of wearing glasses during a movie, it bugs me.
    .-= Extreme John´s last blog ..Largo Tanning Salon =-.

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