This site tries to bring together all the lore, art, science, practice, and experience of building scalable websites into one place so you can learn how to build your own website with confidence. Please Start Here. ...
Kevin Clark, director of IT operations for Lucasfilm, discusses how their data center works: * Linux -based platform, SUSE (looking to change), and a lot of proprietary open source applications for content creation. * 4,500-processor render farm in the datacenter. Workstations are used off hours. * Developed their own proprietary scheduler to schedule their 5,500 available processors. * Render nodes, the blade racks (from Verari), run dual-core dual Opteron chips with 32GB of memory on board, but are expanding those to quad-core. Are an AMD shop. * 400TB of storage online for production. * Every night they write out 10-20TB of new data on a render. A project will use up to a hundred-plus terabytes of storage. * Incremental backups are a challenge because the data changes up to 50 percent over a week. * NetApps used for storage. They like the global namespace in the virtual file system. * Foundry Networks architecture shop. One of the larger 10-GbE-backbone facilities on the West coast. 350-plus 10 GbE ports that used for distribution throughout the facility and the backend. * Grid computing used for over 4 years. * A 10-Gig dark fiber connection connects San Rafael and their home office. Enables them to co-render and co-storage between the two facilities. No difference in performance in terms of where they went to look for their data and their shots. * Artists get server class machines: HP 9400 workstations with dual-core dual Opteron ...
Anytime
