Weta Digital BladeCenter Cluster

Also known as Weta Digital IBM HS20 render farm

Researched with AI assistance, checked by scripts. These rows were researched by AI agents reading public operator, laboratory and vendor sources, appended by scripts and checked by automated validation; no subject-matter expert has reviewed them (how this site is made). A mechanical second-reader pass has since fetched every cited source: 1350 of 1540 systems have a readable citation that names them, and 64 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: 1.76 TFlop/s
Rpeak: 6.59 TFlop/s
Rmax ÷ Rpeak: 26.6%
Cores: 1,176
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	- IBM BladeCenter HS20 dual-processor blades	IBM IBMNYSE	-	Reported	top500.org computerworld.com
CPU	- Intel Pentium 4 Xeon 2.8 GHz, 1,176 processors	Intel INTCNASDAQ	1,176 reported	Reported	top500.org

The read

IBM BladeCenter Xeon 2.8 GHz cluster of the Wellington visual-effects studio Weta Digital, the render farm used for the Lord of the Rings films. TOP500 lists 1,176 cores on Gigabit Ethernet under Linux, first at rank 44 in November 2003 with Rmax 1,755 GFlop/s (Rpeak 6,585.6), 2,026 GFlop/s from June 2004, last at rank 493 in June 2006 (https://www.top500.org/system/173326/); the November 2003 figure is recorded. A second Weta BladeCenter entry sits at rank 48 in the same list (https://www.top500.org/system/173323/). Computerworld (October 2004) puts the whole 3-D rendering farm at 3,200 processors, about 2,400 of them on IBM BladeCenter dual-processor HS20 blades and the rest on 1U servers, says Weta added 500 processors in about three weeks for The Two Towers, and mentions more than 60 TB of NAS on 17 filers; the TOP500 entry is therefore a benchmarked subset of a larger farm. This is a production rendering system rather than a research machine; Weta's later TOP500 system in the dataset is weta-digital-apollo6000.

Timeline

2003 First operational source
2003-11 List debut at #44 (November 2003) source

Public list appearances

Pointers only: rank and edition, linking to the canonical entry. We do not reproduce list tables. See sourcing policy.

#44: TOP500, November 2003 →

Change history

2026-10-17 Added Weta Digital BladeCenter Cluster

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
computerworld.com	names system only	-
top500.org	names system only	-

Checked 2026-10-18 by pnpm verify. Re-run it and the table changes with the web.