Cluster Computing:

WETA DIGITAL CREATES MAGIC WITH LORD OF THE RINGS TRILOGY

The Lord of the Rings trilogy, in addition to breaking Academy Award records, has amazed audiences worldwide with its innovative technology. Weta Digital, created by LOTR director Peter Jackson and others over 10 years ago, provided the technical support for the films.

The firm was first formed in 1993 to provide support to the film Heavenly Creatures and leased but one computer. But now, only running behind Japan's Earth Simulator and the supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Weta has the third largest supercomputer in the world with 3300 processors. It is located in Miramar New Zealand.

Despite the number of processors, the Weta supercomputer is not included in the Top 500 supercomputer list because of the way the rankings for computing power are calculated.

Weta executives are promoting New Zealand's image as a land of technical and programming opportunity. And they believe the accomplishments achieved in the Lord of the Rings series attest to this claim.

Some of the data stored by Weta is a few years old because of repeated sequences in the films, and finding and moving that data to use more than once took close to three days. In all, Weta has 220 million files holding 500 terabytes of data.

Weta hopes to archive the database to make it more available for future projects. Currently, a double drive failure in one of its disk stores could require months of work to repair the damage.

The final movie of the series, The Return of the King, has most of the data from the database. The special effect shots approximately doubled for each movie, starting with 400, increasing to 900 and ending with 1500.

The Battle of the Pelennor fields, consisting of 120,000 digital and individual orc monsters battling 8,000 Riders of Rohan, was the longest sequence to create.

In fact, the sequence threatened the timely release of the movie. The film was to be released December 18th, but August estimates had the battle sequence taking close to 347 days to finish.

The original solution was to add more computers to the four Weta data centers, but they were already too crowded. So a new data center was built and connected to the other four via 10 gigabit per second cable. IBM was contracted to build the computers Weta needed and formed a specific production line just for the task.

Two weeks later, production on the scene began.

Weta and its resources will also help to contribute to upcoming movies such as I, Robot and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.

Executives are looking into using a Grid-type approach, allowing for great processing power only when needed, for future computing power demands. Yet the possibility of needing more power than currently available is unlikely.

Jackson's next film, a King Kong remake, could be even bigger than Lord of the Rings in terms of special effects. Though only consisting of one major monster, or ape, creating the minute details could necessitate enormous amounts of processing power.