WETA Digital may or may not have had a datacenter fire

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A commenter left a comment on a post from back in July about WETA Digital’s growing HPC capacity. You WETA already: they are the special effects rockstars behind Lord of the Rings, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, X-Men: The Last Stand, and others. HP announced during Dresden that the company has installed 100 TFLOPS of rendering capablity in 4 different clusters that rank 219-222 on the that Top500 list.

Anyway, Noir left a comment about a fire on that story (comment here). I won’t reproduce the comment in its entirety here since it includes the entire Computerworld story, but here are excerpts

Not many people are talking about the Fire that happened out at WETA. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/D378E7E589536D7DCC2574CC000AAD18

Computerworld had been told an HP blade server caught fire, bringing out the fire brigade….Partly true, according to a PR spokeswoman at Weta. She says a “sensitivity” caused a hot spot in an old computer room, about to be decommissioned, which triggered an automatic call-out by the fire brigade. Asked to define “sensitivity”, she couldn’t

To say that not many people are talking about it is an understatement. In fact, a couple reasonable Google searches turned up zero hits other than the cited story at Computerworld. While it’s true that the spokeswoman’s explanation is totally bogus, it seems reasonable that this could have happened as indicated and that this really isn’t a story. But, if you’re from that part of the globe and know anything, leave us a comment.