Now for a little Lord of the Rings talk. According to an article in the New Zealand herald, Weta Digital has taken the Top500 by storm. Weta Digital has been made famous by their artful creations in movie effects and 3D animation/rendering. Naturally, one needs a serious amount of compute to perform such a task at scale. Rather than benchmarking the number of Orcs per second can be created, they decided to run Linpack and submit the results to the Top500. All told, they have six machines on the list.
Weta’s Linux-toting 5936 core HP Cluster Platform 3000 BL 2×220 was 279th, followed by four similarly-specced machines. [NZHerald]
Very cool stuff! For more info, read their full article here.
As I mentioned on Twitter, Weta Digital have had a presence in every Top500 list since 2003 (except for the two lists in 2007), so I’m surprised there’s all this fuss about it now as they actually more machines and a higher total Rmax in the last list.
Here’s their Top500 page:
http://top500.org/site/history/2343
Well, it’s well known that neither John reads the other’s stuff, Chris.
http://insidehpc.com/2008/07/25/weta-quietly-building-an-hpc-powerhouse/
So it goes.