INDUSTRY

The IBM Xeon blade servers, each with two 3.4 gigahertz processors and 8 gigabytes of memory, are housed at the New Zealand Supercomputing Centre in central Wellington, New Zealand. They have been added to the center's existing bank of 1144 Intel 2.8GHz processors, boosting its power by 50 per cent to create a supercomputer with the equivalent power of nearly 15,000 PCs. The servers run the Red Hat version of the open-source Linux operating system. The purchase means the center is back among the 100 largest supercomputing clusters in the world. Weta Digital has another bank of 500 blade servers in Miramar, New Zealand. It bought the processors that now make up the center to finish the special effects for The Return of the King, after running out of space in its computer rooms in Miramar. The center is a joint venture between Weta and Telecom-owned Gen-i, which supplied the latest batch of processors. Other businesses using the center include a chip maker, a biotech company and a yacht designer.