Saturday, December 26, 2009

Avatar Got its Life Here – Weta Digital

Did you ever wanted to know where do movies like Avatar get their fantastic visual effects. We all know that these movies are created using computers, but these computers are not just typical computers that we see daily. It is computing infrastructure of companies like Weta Digital, that is used to  bring life to characters like Avatar.

 

Weta Digital, a visual effects company located in Wellington, New Zealand has a 10,000 sq foot Data Centre where blockbuster movies like King Kong, The Lord of the Rings, iRobot to name a few got their Visual effects.

 

The Data Centre rebuilt in summer of 2008 consists of 34 Racks, populated with 4,000 HP BL2x220c blades, connected by 10 GB network lines (Typically we use 1 GB in our Enterprises) with 104 Terabytes of memory (RAM), 40,000 Processors. These systems are connected to network attached storage from BluArc and Netapp connected using fast fiber channel. This complete setup occupies spot in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers. They use water-cooled racks instead of forced-air cooling typically used in Data Centers.

 

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The computers here process up to 1.4 million tasks per day consisting 8GB of data per second, running 24x7. Just to understand what the final file of Avatar consists of, it took around 17 GB of storage per minute part of Avatar at 12 MB per frame (Each second of movie consists of 24 frames).

 

For more info for your interest you can check Weta’s website and below links

link 1 – Avata Data Processing

link 2 – Data Crunching Powerhouse behind Avatar

Saturday, December 19, 2009

New Protocol SPDY from Google to Speed Up the Web

Google has announced that it is working on a new protocol SPDY (pronounced "speedy") to speed up the Web experience.

 

According to the white paper released by Google, the goals are to reduce page load times by 50%, minimize complexity and avoid changes to be made by website owners to implement SPDY.

 

Google released chrome to make browser developer to focus on speed  and with SPDY, Google wants to improve the experience much more by new protocols on the Internet.

 

Below are the improvements of SPDY over HTTP:

  • Multiplexed requests: No limit to the number of requests that can be issued concurrently over a single SPDY connection.  Requests are interleaved on one , to increase the efficiency of TCP.
  • Prioritized requests: Clients can request certain resources to be delivered first to problem of congesting the network with non-critical resources.
  • Compressed headers:  Today clients send a significant amount of redundant data in the form of HTTP headers and this data is important as a single Web page may require 50 or 100 sub requests. Compressing these headers save a significant amount of latency and bandwidth compared to HTTP.
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More info can be found here and here

Thursday, December 17, 2009

The Smallest Calendar

Here is a smallest calendar I found on the site here created by Mr.Massimiliano. This is just of the size of a single business card. If you like it you can download it as a PDF from his site here.

 

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