February 16th, 2010 
Kiwi Si 
If you haven’t been to see the movie Avatar yet then I thoroughly recommend it. I went into the movie theatre half expecting to see an over-hyped version of Pocahontas in space though walked out thoroughly impressed not just with the story line, which admittedly was a little predictable, but with the quality and integration of the CGI and real-world actors.
So what sort of hardware was behind the rendering of this CGI intensive block buster? Well, the answer is a rather large farm of HP BL2×220c blade servers located down under in New Zealand at Weta Digital. There have been some rather good posts outlining more of the technical details and cooling behind this massive blade implementation such as Kevin Houston’s post, “The Hit Movie, AVATAR Processed on HP Blade Servers” and HP’s own article, “The Magic of Avatar hits New Zealand screens“.
To get an appreciation of this, the worlds largest rendering farm, I thought what better way than to put it into pictures:
Quite a an impressive infrastructure I think you’ll agree. Despite the efficient HP power saving technologies used in HP’s blade products, I’m glad I don’t pay the power bill… 
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My name is Simon Seagrave and I am a London (UK) based Senior Technology Consultant and vSpecialist working for EMC. 
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by Kiwi_Si: New TechHead Post: “In Pictures: The HP hardware behind the movie Avatar” http://bit.ly/b4hso1...
Simon – thanks for the link back. I love the pictures. It’s a much easier way to get the message. Maybe I’ll try that trick next time
Appreciate your support!
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Wow impressive stuff!
I do wonder however how they managed to get over 18 cores in a single HP BL2×220c blade server … Specs on the HP site tell me that it supports max 2 CPU’s with each 4 cores ?!
So I guess HP came up with a special “HP BL2×220c Avatar edition”; when will it be available to us ?
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