ILM’s state-of-the-art (storage) studio
Industrial Light & Magic uses high-speed NAS servers with a distributed file system, 10gb/sec Ethernet, and a 5000-node renderfarm to store and move 170tb of content
By Barbara Robertson
When George Lucas moved a large part of his filmmaking empire from San Rafael, California-a small town north of San Francisco-into a state-of-the-art, four-building complex on 17 acres of parkland in San Francisco’s Presidio, he spared no detail. Lawrence Halprin, the renowned landscape architect, even rearranged individual rocks in the babbling brook that rambles through the campus to achieve the most pleasing sound.
Similarly, the technical team left no stone unturned when it developed the infrastructure that powers Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), Lucas’ award-winning visual arts facility, and the Lucas Arts game-development division. “When we went from San Rafael to the Presidio, we had a 10X increase in network bandwidth,” says systems developer Michael Thompson. “We knew it would be coming, so we designed a system that could handle a massive jump in network throughput.”
A quality production company ILM makes many of the movies I (an many others) love. So it was interesting on how they deal with the huge amount of images they would end up creating. Movies at say 30 frames a second could go into thousands and millions of images easily. BTW – If you think you knew all the CG that ILM did, or you think you can automatically know when they had their hand ina movie, take a look at this list and see how close you where.
The limitation they where running into ping delay and implimenting a NAS solution is one I’d love to see how they answer.
Tags: Movies, Networking, Technology
