Stickin' to What I Know

You guessed it! Rendering yet again. I don't know what it is about it, but I find it so fascinating. I think it's because of all of the computing power that goes into things like this. ANYWAY. I decided to make this post about the rendering related to James Cameron's Avatar.

Now I was looking through some articles and though I wasn't able to find how many frames were in the film, I was able to find how much storage was used to store the movie. While looking at the article, I found that it took 1 PETABYTE of storage. To put this into perspective, take 500 2 Terabyte drives and put them in a room... That's a Petabyte. Talk about huge. The place that rendered this is the same place that rendered King Kong and Lord of the Rings. You KNOW that this is a high class place when you hear those two movies in the same sentence.

Onto my favorite part of these articles: The computing power of these facilities. In the article it states that there are 34 racks of 32 machines. Doing some math that equates to 1088 machines. But going even deeper, there are about 40,000 processors and 104 Terabytes of RAM. TERABYTES OF RAM. That amount of ram is so much RAM, I can run 15 different video games, most likely 3 times over. Needless to say I couldn't even dream of that much RAM in a machine, let alone under one roof.

A small tid bit about this too: Cameron had a 300 million dollar budget according to this article. The storage alone for this movie would have been in the millions. That's just plain ridiculous.

If you want to read the article I got this info from, it's right here.