Ubuntu Linux Used in the Making of Avatar

Linux infrastructure was heavily used in Avatar's graphics rendering done by Weta Digital.

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(C) Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Weta Digital is the digital visual effects company which worked on the visual effects of the flora and fauna of Pandora. To achieve the impressive visual effects, Weta Digital have modified their in-house software Massive and used their 10,000 square foot Data Center with more than 40,000 CPUs.

The Data Center of Weta Digital was re-built in 2008 and consists of 34 racks and more than 4,000 Hewlett-Packard blade servers with a 104TB of RAM. Ubuntu is at the core of all of this, running on all of the rendering nodes, and 90% of the desktops at Weta Digital, according to Paul Gunn, the data center's systems administrator.

The "farm" is in fact an Ubuntu Server farm and does not run Red Hat Linux as previously reported by the Media.

Processing 7 to 8 gigabytes of data per second, running 24 hours a day and 17.28 gigabytes per minute of storage, the computing power and data management put the system in position 193 between top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world.

Weta Digital was co-founded by Peter Jackson and is located in Wellington, New Zealand. Some of the productions Weta Digital worked on are The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, Fantastic Four, Eragon, X-Men and i-Robot.


Ubuntu Linux Used in the Making of Avatar | Jordan Open Source Association

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