Some new information about Weta’s handling of the massive data within Avatar discusses their huge data center, which recently got a huge redesign and hardware upgrade.

The Weta data center got a major hardware refresh and redesign in 2008 and now uses more than 4,000 HP BL2×220c blades (new BL2×220c G6 blades announced last month), 10 Gigabit Ethernet networking gear from Foundry and storage from BluArc and NetApp. The system now occupies spot 193 through 197 in the Top 500 list of the most powerful supercomputers.

Thirty four racks comprise the computing core, made of 32 machines each with 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of memory. Weta systems administrator Paul Gunn said that heat exchange for their servers had to be enclosed. The “industry standard of raised floors and forced-air cooling could not keep up with the constant heat coming off the machines,” said Gunn. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local.” The solutions was the use of water-cooled racks from Rittal.

This massive data center was pushing a massive 7-8 gigabytes of data per second, 24 hours a day.  The final copy of Avatar was equivalent to 17.28 Gigabytes per minute of storage.

You can hit WETA’s page on the Top500 to see their 7 entries.

via The Data-Crunching Powerhouse Behind ‘Avatar’ « Data Center Knowledge.