Dr. D Studios won is preparing for the sequel to Oscar-winning ‘Happy Feet’ by upgrading their large render farm from 4096 cores to a nice round 6000, but managed to cut the size down significantly thanks to some help from APC and Equinix.
Sydney-based Dr. D Studios is enjoying the advances in compute density as they fit everything into just 24 chassis, instead of the 250 that it took for the original Happy Feet. James Bourne, infrastructure engineering manager for Dr. D sums it up nice by saying that “back [in 2005], we were working with single-core [Intel] Xeons; as hyperthreading was of little benefit. Each blade had two cores then – now they have eight – and 16 per node should hyper-threading be turned on. Memory density has increased as well now from 1.5GB per node to 24GB.”
Their previous cluster was 4096-cores, and scored number #447 on the Top 500. They currently have 6000 cores running, with power and cooling available to scale up to 12,000, which they plan to do in mid 2011.
You can read more about the datacenter in this article that makes reference to an ‘unnamed’ large HPC customer, which presumably is Dr. D.
via Rendering ‘Happy Feet 2′ at 30kW a Rack « Data Center Knowledge.
