Supercomputers/Systems/Weta Digital Apollo 6000
New Zealand · upgraded · hpc
Weta Digital Apollo 6000
Operated by Weta Digital at Weta Digital Wellington Studio .
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
- 470.00 TFlop/s
- Rpeak
- 770.00 TFlop/s
- Rmax ÷ Rpeak
- 61.0%
- Cores
- 19,200
- Power
- 1.06 MW
- Per watt
- 0.4 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 | - HPE Apollo 6000 XL230a Gen9 blade servers, 10G Ethernet fabric | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 800 estimated | Reported | top500.org |
| CPU | - Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 (12-core, 2.5GHz), two per node | Intel | 1,600 estimated | Reported | top500.org |
The read
Weta Digital's render and simulation cluster in Wellington, submitted to TOP500 in November 2015 (rank 188) as an HPE Apollo 6000 XL230a blade cluster with dual Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 (12-core, 2.5GHz) nodes on a 10G Ethernet fabric, drawing 1,060 kW. TOP500's own system page shows the same machine expanded in place to 21,600 cores by November 2017 (rank 499, 0.55 PFlop/s Rmax), which is why status is recorded as upgraded rather than a single fixed configuration. This is a separate, later machine from the roughly 35,000-core HP BL2x220c 'Render Wall' widely reported in trade press around Avatar's 2009 release; that earlier farm does not appear to have been submitted to TOP500 under a name matching the press descriptions, so it is not the system recorded here. Weta Digital's software, tools and engineering team were sold to Unity Technologies in December 2021 for 1.625 billion dollars; the production studio itself continued independently under Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor and was renamed Weta FX.
Timeline
Public list appearances
Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.
Site & facility
Change history
- 2026-09-30 Weta Digital Apollo 6000 added, TOP500-documented HPE Apollo 6000 render and simulation cluster at Weta Digital's Wellington, New Zealand studio
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 |
|---|---|---|
| top500.org | names system only | - |
Checked 2026-10-09 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.