LotR computers up for rent
p2pnet.net News:- Five hundred boxes used by New Zealand’s Weta Digital on some of the special effects for Lord of the Rings trilogy may be rented out and six organisations have already shown an interest.
Wellington-based Weta moved some of its LotR production work to IBM Intellistations running Linux. Now, it’s thinking about renting out several racks of the blade servers in partnership with Telecom Advanced Solutions, which would share the income.
Telecom has been hosting the hardware in central Wellington since last winter, after Weta ran out of space in its own computer rooms in Miramar, says New Zealand’s Stuff here.
“The extra servers were brought in to help create the effects for the final instalment of the trilogy, boosting Weta’s processing capacity by about a third,” it says.
“They were linked to Weta’s main site in Miramar using a 10 gigabit fibre-optic connection. The pizza-box sized IBM blade servers each incorporate dual 2.8 gigahertz Intel Xeon processors and 6 gigabytes of memory.”
Telecom Advanced Solutions general manager Chris Quin says Telecom could connect customers to the hardware so it would appear as if the servers were sitting on their own local area network.
Weta Digital’s technical head Scott Houston says Weta owns about 1600 servers incorporating 3200 processors in total, as well as 500 workstations and 70 terabytes of online storage.
“Some PCs, mostly older systems used to help create the first film in the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, have been donated to a local school,” adds Stuff.
