Supercomputers/Systems/ILM Death Star
USA · decommissioned · hpc
ILM Death Star
Also known as Lucasfilm Death Star Render Farm
Operated by Industrial Light & Magic at ILM San Rafael Facility .
Phase 1 seed dataset, compiled by hand. These rows were built from public operator, laboratory and vendor sources. A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1092 of 1153 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 40 are genuinely weakly sourced. Every claim carries its source and a confidence tier. Treat anything below verified as a lead, not a citation.
Measured performance
- Rmax
- -
- Rpeak
- -
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- -
- Cores
- 3,000
- Power
- -
- Per watt
- - GF/W
Figures are as last publicly reported for the configuration described below, not a live measurement. Where a system was upgraded in place, the post-upgrade configuration is shown and the earlier one appears in the timeline.
What this machine is made of
One row per supplier relationship. “Supplier at build” is the company that shipped the part at the time; where that company has since been acquired, the parent it rolls up to today is shown beside it. That distinction is what makes ticker-level aggregation possible across a thirty-year dataset.
| Role | Part | Supplier at build | Quantity | Confidence | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integrator | - RackSaver RS-1100 dual-socket 1U servers, expanded from 750 to about 1,500 nodes for Episode III | RackSaver | 1,500 reported | Verified | linuxjournal.comallthingsd.com |
| CPU | - AMD Athlon 1600 (single core, low power) processors, two per node | AMD | 3,000 reported | Verified | linuxjournal.comallthingsd.com |
The read
Industrial Light & Magic's Linux render farm, nicknamed the Death Star, built from RackSaver RS-1100 dual-socket 1U servers running single-core AMD Athlon 1600 processors at ILM's San Rafael, California facility. Linux Journal's August 2003 account of the Hulk (2003) production put it at 750 nodes and 1,500 CPUs; ILM ordered enough RackSaver hardware to double that to roughly 3,000 processors for Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith (2005). A separate Computerworld report from October 2004 describes a broadly similar blade based farm reaching about 2,000 processors, but attributes roughly half of it to Angstrom Microsystems blades rather than RackSaver, so that figure is treated here as describing an overlapping or partially different deployment rather than a second confirmation of the RackSaver count. By the time AllThingsD toured Lucasfilm's data center in March 2011, the Death Star's RackSaver racks were retired, sitting alongside the newer IBM BladeCenter systems that had replaced them; ILM's own TOP500 appearances (1997 to 2000, under Silicon Graphics Origin 2000 hardware) predate the Death Star and are a distinct, earlier system not recorded in this row.
Timeline
- 2003-08 First operational source
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-30 ILM Death Star added, Industrial Light & Magic's RackSaver based Linux render farm used on the Star Wars prequel trilogy
Source check
We fetched this system's own citations and recorded whether each page actually mentions it. This is a corroboration signal, not a fact check, and it is published so you can see how well the sourcing holds up rather than take it on trust.
| Cited source | Result | Found on the page |
|---|---|---|
| allthingsd.com | names system only | - |
| linuxjournal.com | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.