The motion picture Avatar was released in 2009 and was a huge success. It was a great blockbuster which was directed and written by James Cameron, the director of Titanic. It has got a plot which is a combination of Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Adventure and Action with the story taking place in the year of 2154 on the Pandora planet, which is a moon in the Alpha Centauri start system where humans are aliens. The term Avatar refers to the genetically engineered bodies which are used by humans to interact with Navi the natives of Pandora. The main plot of the movie revolves around a paraplegic marine who is dispatched to the Pandora moon on a mission. He is torn between protecting the world which he feels is his home and following his orders.
Fans all over were mesmerized by the movies dazzling special effects. Ticket sales worldwide quickly surpassed $1 billion. Box office records were broken. Critics kept raving that there had been no movie like it. In addition to breaking box office records, Avatar was nominated for 9 Critics Choice movie awards and 4 Golden Globe awards including the one for the Best Picture. Critics have given the film rave reviews on sites such as Rotten Tomatoes. It was labeled as a movie which would define what movies can achieve for years to come.
If you are a technologist, you must be wondering as to what kind of computing power it would take to generate fantastic visual effects for movies such as Camerons Avatar. The answer is A LOT! In search of superior computing for crunching the numbers for amazing movie effects, a visual effects company was used to get the job done.
The server farm company used for Avatar spanned 10,000 square foot and was hard at work generating images for the CGI movie. Such technologies were used in previous films such as Lord of the Rings trilogy, X-Men, King Kong and more.
The visual effects department at the company comprised of major processing power which consisted of 34 racks with 4 chassis of 32 machines each. This combination yielded a total of 40,000 processors and 104 TB of memory utilizing about 10 GB networking adapters. There were 4,000 HP BL2x220c blade computers being used.
To tackle the Herculean task of creating Avatar, the companys super computers processed about 1.4 million tasks every day to render the movie. This consisted of processing 8 GB of data per second and running all the 24 hours a day for more than a month. Each of Avatars frames took many hours to render. When you think about how that is just one frame out of the 24 for each second of the movie, you could imagine why the powerful processing power was needed.
This article is from the world's most professional online render farm .
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