Blades Go Hollywood

The Golden Globes turned many eyes toward Hollywood this week, as viewers tuned in to the awards show to see who was winning what and who was wearing whom. Hollywood mania will continue through the Academy Awards, and while many of us aren’t very concerned with Oscar fashion, it might be time to start paying a little more attention to what’s going on in other parts of the film industry.

Some of the biggest movies of the last several years have featured effects generated on blade servers, and the phrase “centralized computing” is becoming somewhat of a buzzword in the movie studios. The blade craze in Hollywood started as so many other things do: with a giant gorilla.

“When moviegoers face the huge, superrealistic mug of an entirely digital King Kong in multiplexes in the coming weeks, they’ll have one of the hottest technologies in computerdom to thank for the hair-raising experience. At the other end of the computing spectrum, Air Force personnel who do their banking with Randolph Brooks Federal Credit Union in San Antonio, Tex., benefit from the same technology.

That’s the magic of blade servers. Originally conceived as a niche product for huge computing centers, these slim servers-on-a-rack have become the Swiss army knife of modern computing.” (Business Week)

Blade servers provide the high availability and the massive processing power necessary to generate elaborate 3D visual effects. They also make good budget and logistical sense: visual effects studios can pack more computational muscle into a smaller space, and decreased setup and configuration times suit the hectic pace of film production schedules.

“‘We can get a system in-house and online within two days, where historically it would take us about a week to build a rack of processors,’ says [Industrial Light and Magic’s CTO Cliff] Plumer.” (Computerworld)

PC Blades offer benefits similar to those of PC servers, albeit on a smaller scale: robust and reliable computing capabilities, easier maintenance, efficient use of space and energy, and effective use of capital. You wouldn’t want to render the special effects for King Kong on a PC Blade solution — but you might want to run your business on it.