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.
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