Profile: Weta Digital Renderwall and Sundry Hangers On
Personal background
We've actually been members of Seti@Home for over 3 years. We had to stop processing results when the rendering requirements for "The Lord Of The Rings" became too great. Now that we're between films we have a couple of months to crunch some results on our renderwall before "Return Of The King" starts in earnest.
We started on October 28 2002 with around 400 results done 3 years ago. With at least 64 Pentium 4 Xeon 2.2GHz processors running 24 hours a day and another 400 or so working overnight and on weekends we're churning out the results nice and quick!
Thoughts about SETI and SETI@home
Weta actually did some work on the movie "Contact" which is all about SETI finally receiving a signal. I would love for something like that to happen within my lifetime but in reality the speed of light is just too damn slow!
I'd like to see SETI@Home processing work units from other telescopes since Arecibo only scans such a small part of the sky.
We sometimes think we should write LOTR@Home so people can help us with our huge rendering requirements!
SETI@home and Astropulse are funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, NASA, and donations from SETI@home volunteers. AstroPulse is funded in part by the NSF through grant AST-0307956.
