There isn’t any question about the power of linux/unix on the server and desktop level, but a little acknowledgement never hurts.
I recently posted about the release of Ubuntu 10.10. While this isn’t as fresh, it is equally as interesting. Dustin Kirkland, a core developer of Ubuntu Server at Canonical posted in January about how Weta uses Ubuntu at their studio.
In his post Dustin mentioned how he had a chance to sit down and talk to Paul Gunn, the Systems Administrator at Weta Digital.
It was a great talk, about the type of data center needed to render special effects in today’s blockbuster movies. They have a 2 Petabyte disk array, 10gbps networking, and 35,000 cores (4,000+ HP blades) in their data center, and still it takes 48 hours to render some of their graphic sequences.
That is a pretty respectable data center! And Unbuntu is at the heart of it. The OS is currently running on all of the rendering nodes as well as 90% of the studios desktops. That means that all of those breath taking scenes you enjoyed in films like Avatar made their way through the sudio’s Ubuntu render farm.
I first saw this on Christer Edwards blog, Ubuntu Tutorials. He noted a couple of other films that Weta Digital has work on, these include such blockbusters as:
- Avatar
- District 9
- The Day the Earth Stood Still
- King Kong
- Jumper
- Lord of the Rings
- Fantastic Four
- i-Robot
- X-Men
- Eragon
Where they also rendered on Ubuntu? That isn’t confirmed but with the size of their render farm you can be sure it didn’t spring up over night.
