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The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’
A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center used to render the animation for the new James Cameron movie "Avatar." (Photo: Foundry Networks Inc.)
It takes a lot of data center horsepower to create the stunning visual effects behind blockbuster movies such as King Kong, X-Men, the Lord of the Rings trilogy and most recently, James Cameron’s $230 million Avatar. Tucked away in Wellington, New Zealand are the facilities where visual effects company Weta Digital renders the imaginary landscapes of Middle Earth and Pandora at a campus of studios, production facilities, soundstages and a purpose-built data center.
The 10,000 square foot server farm manages thousands of work orders and a serious amount of data. Information Management magazine reports on the creative artists and rendering done for the movie, as well as the thoroughbred data center supporting it.
The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2x220c blades (new BL2x220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.
Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed. The “industry standard of raised floors and forced-air cooling could not keep up with the constant heat coming off the machines,” said Gunn. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local.” The solutions was the use of water-cooled racks from Rittal.
Gunn also noted that tens of thousands of dollars were saved by fine tuning the temperature by a degree. Weta won an energy excellence award recently for building a smaller footprint that came with a 40 percent lower cooling cost for a data center of its type.
For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. For a 166 minute movie the rendering coordination was intense.
Based on the #avatar Twitter hash tag comments I would say the visual effects are a success.
We previously discussed the Weta Digital facility last year in One Data Center to Rule Them All.
Justin
Posted December 22nd, 2009I believe Isilon gear is also used in the production of Avatar. There was a press release a few days ago about that.
Weta’s Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ | VizWorld.com
Posted December 22nd, 2009[...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ « Data Center Knowledge. [...]
Impressive geek stuff 
I didn’t knew Weta was behind Avatar’s visual effects. I guess this means that “The Hobbit” will be as visual rich as Avatar, which is awesome
Max
Posted December 23rd, 2009Isilon boxes were used to store the finished product… IIRC NetApp was used for the render farm at Weta.
Pity that after sepnding so much effort and money on the FX, a few dollars had been spent on the script. ‘Avatar’ is certainly spectacular but its also dramatically empty and a bit dull.
Turbo Finds His Avatar « Turbotodd
Posted December 23rd, 2009[...] stumbled upon this article from Data Center Knowledge which explained the horsepower that was required by Weta Digital to do [...]
Daily Digest for December 24th | Reading Muzaki
Posted December 24th, 2009[...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ [...]
Anonymous
Posted December 24th, 2009[...] [...]
Whoa! Really cool stuff. Now I know how they got all those 3D effects. No wonder the movie was such a high-budget one!
Avatar Got its Life Here – Weta Digital « KrishnaChaitanya Ch
Posted December 26th, 2009[...] link 2 – Data Crunching Powerhouse behind Avatar [...]
The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ « urban-listening
Posted December 28th, 2009[...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ 28 12 2009 via datacenterknowledge.com [...]
Mike
Posted December 28th, 2009Will it run Crysis?
Funtomas
Posted December 30th, 2009How much was on the power supplier bill or what’s the power consumption in total?
Calus
Posted December 30th, 2009proberly not Mike
Yogi
Posted December 31st, 2009I’d have liked to know about its software infrastructure too.
Data Centers: Weta Digital, New Zealand « UNIX Administratosphere
Posted January 1st, 2010[...] Center Knowledge has an article about their data center, as well as another one about it last [...]
This article does not mention that THIS COMPUTER USES LINUX, a free operating system which is the most used in supercomputers of the world.
The Technology Behind Avatar
Posted January 2nd, 2010[...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. For a 166 minute movie the rendering coordination was intense. [...]
ac
Posted January 3rd, 2010As for software, the only sure thing is that it’s Linux.
The computers behind Avatar’s SFX | Andy Chiw
Posted January 6th, 2010[...] no SGI here. Instead, we have HP, how surprising! It turns out that a company called Weta Digital based in New Zealand did all the rendering for Avatar and King [...]
World’s Strangest | Link Latte 125
Posted January 9th, 2010[...] on Times Square in VR – [has audio]Top Ten Places You Can’t Go – [fascinating]The data-crunching powerhouse behind “Avatar” – [geek info]Men were there only once, in 1960, for 20 minutes… – [time to [...]
paul
Posted January 17th, 2010I think that they using OS HP-UX
the weta digital data center that crunched avatar
Posted January 18th, 2010[...] A read into the 10,000 square foot server farm at weta responsible for some blockbuster renderings as king kong, lord of the rings, and most recently, avatar. The weta data center uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades in a drooling thirty four racks that comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. In my mind some smart kid programmer should just make distributed rendering on iphone’s in china when they are all asleep and be done with all this. [...]
La potencia de procesado de datos detrás de "Avatar"
Posted January 19th, 2010[...] La potencia de procesado de datos detrás de "Avatar" http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/22/the-data-cru… por Harkon hace 2 segundos [...]
10 Blockbusters Made with the Help of Linux | Linux Netbook
Posted January 19th, 2010[...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind Avatar [...]
Avatar 3D – The Hardware Behind The Movie — TechPatio
Posted January 21st, 2010[...] 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 [...]
marcus
Posted January 22nd, 2010@Mike – will it run crysis?
with the correct software probably yeah, but that sounds like killing a fly with a gun….lmfao
Ty Williams
Posted January 28th, 2010I am so impressed with these efforts to go green and save the environment, especially for entertainment. Can’t wait for DiCaprio’s green resort!
Design-Vorlagen, Shop-Urteile, Avatar Technik > News, Tipps > App Design, Avatar, Avatar Technik, Design-Vorlagen, iPhone Vorlagen, Shop-Urteile, Webmaster
Posted January 29th, 2010[...] ist technisch schon sehr beeindruckend. Auf techpatio.com beschäftigt man sich mit der Technik die verwendet wurde, um den Film zu [...]
Ty Williams
Posted January 29th, 2010How green! The Haitians really are impressed wit this use of resources.
Liperty
Posted February 5th, 2010Finally a rig that can probably play Crysis maxed out… ;p
Who Says Data Centers Aren’t Cool? | Exectweets
Posted February 8th, 2010[...] visual imagery that went into the movie, which cost $237 million to make. Datacenterknowledge has the details about the horsepower needed to do the crunching to make the movie. Situated in a 10,000 square foot [...]
With such powerhouse surely there’ll be more awesome movie coming out soon!
Now, that’s more than impressive…I want one in my cellar 
3Mo0
Posted February 15th, 2010@marcus – with the correct software probably yeah, but that sounds like killing a fly with a gun….lmfao
I think you mean this is like killing a fly with the World’s ENTIRE stockpile of Nuclear weapons!
SmakStudios.com » Blog Archive » WETA DIGITAL – Data-Crunching PowerHouse
Posted March 4th, 2010[...] Original Article: http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2009/12/22/the-data-crunching-powerhouse-behind-avatar/ [...]
The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ – Eternal Code
Posted March 20th, 2010[...] datacenterknowledge.com] A look at some of the high-density server and networking gear inside the Weta Digital data center [...]
me
Posted June 21st, 2010If so much heat is produced by these machines why can’t it be sent to where it might be useful, like heating public buildings, or even people’ shomes?
The computing power that created Avatar - Overclock.net - Overclocking.net
Posted July 26th, 2010[...] start a discussion about this movie and the rendering needed/ the computers needed to render this. http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/a…behind-avatar/ __________________ We Are Gr33n Machine We Are PhenomIsts! [...]
Hey Fellas!!! Quick Question, know your busy and all… Do you think when your done with that movie thingy – maybe I could use it for awhile? THAT WOULD BE AWESOME
Very impressive numbers, like 107 TB of ram… I cry over 12 gigs for $300 and they have 107 TB lol. The processing speed is crazy; as well as, the staggering numbers on the size of the movie, 7TB per minute? How do they deliver the movie? In a box full of hard drives, lol
If that server is generating that much heat, why is the guy in the picture wearing a beanie? Just kidding, massive cpu power 4 teh w1n.
Now lets run SETI on it.
Blogisch! » Blog Archive » Keynote #samboict: “Top trends in Higher: Education, Work and Society”
Posted January 8th, 2011[...] naar Yottabyte (1.000.000.000.000.000.000.000.000 bytes). Oftewel de enorme toename van data met Avatar als [...]
Davy
Posted March 20th, 2011It feels surreal that all this happens a few blocks from where I live. I’m from Wellington New Zealand, and I know a few people who work at Weta. Of course they can’t disclose any information to me, so it’s just amazing to finally see what tech they have there.
ahmed
Posted March 27th, 2011auwsum … totally kool. now i know from where do dey get dose special effects
Mega machine a true monster, must have been a lot of power being pumped in the making of Avtar.
I thought they just use a powerful computer and some sort of software to do animation.
science by robertlong - Pearltrees
Posted December 31st, 2011[...] [...] The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ For the last month or more of production those 40,000 processors were handling 7 or 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day. A final copy of Avatar equated to 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage. The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind 'Avatar' » Data Center Knowledge [...]
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