The Avatar storage effect

The new digital formats and stereoscopic tools used in Avatar generated unprecedented quantities of data that had to be stored and transferred not only between computers but between entire studios.  Isilon provided a clustered IQ filer setup and describes it in an article with The Register.

An Isilon release says: “The Avatar production generated terabytes of data in various formats, including massive digital files used in creating Avatar’s all-digital, virtual filming environment, small metadata and instructional files, still frames for review, and large media files from Avid systems.” The terabytes of data were created on a weekly basis and, sometimes, a daily one.

But Isilon wasn’t the only provider of storage equipment, as NetApp was involved as well.

Weta used NetApp kit to store the incoming data, then used a huge number of workstations and bladed servers – with 30,000 cores in total – to work on it. The NetApp filers were fitted with up to five 160GB DRAM cache accelerator cards in their controllers, the PAM (Performance Acceleration Modules) caches, to speed file access by the Weta creative people and the servers.

via The Avatar storage effect • The Register.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .

Graphics, Hardware avatar, isilon, movie, netapp, storage