The computing power that created Avatar 3D film

The visual effects department at Weta comprises of some major processing power consisting of 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines a piece. The combination of those machines comprises a total of 40,000 processors along with 104 terabytes of memory using 10 GB networking adapters. And if you are wondering what type of computers Weta Digital uses, during an upgrade back in the summer of 2008 their system was rebuilt with over 4,000 HP BL2×220c blade computers.

To tackle the task of helping create Avatar, it took the Weta Digital super computers processing up to 1.4 million tasks per day to render the movie, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month. Often each of Avatar’s frames took several hours to render. And when you consider that is just one frame out of 24 for every second of film, you can imagine why the major processing power at Weta Digital was needed. (source: Computer Chips & Hardware Technology | Geek.com)