Imagine if all that Petabyte of Avatar data was available for mashing up


I was reading Zee’s post over at The Next Web about the massive about of data created and stored in the making of the blockbuster movie everyone knows as Avatar.

It turns out that the entire rendering of the movie required over 1 Petabyte of storage space which according to Clickbits is the equivalent of 500 hard drives of 2TB each.

The movie was shot and rendered in Miramar, New Zealand, (population 8,334) in one of the most powerful purpose-built data centers in the world (same place they created King Kong and Lord of the Rings). According to Information Management, the computing core – 34 racks, each with four chassis of 32 machines each – adds up to some 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. The blades read and write against 3 petabytes of fast fiber channel disk network area storage from BluArc and NetApp.

All the gear sits tightly packed and connected by multiple 10-gigabit network links. “We need to stack the gear closely to get the bandwidth we need for our visual effects, and, because the data flows are so great, the storage has to be local,” says Paul Gunn, Weta’s data center systems administrator.

Now this is totally not going to happen but could imagine the immense amount of creative energies from around the world that would be able to do incredibly creative things is all that data being stored was made available under some sort of Creative Commons copyright.

The idea of artists, filmmakers and other talented people being able to create new and potentially incredible derivative is mind-boggling.

Unfortunately the chances of something this radical ever happening is next t o nil, but one can always hope.

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