Tippett Studio
Gone are the days when a trip to the movies involved marvelling only at the cinematography. Today's blockbusters are more likely to rely on computer-generated graphics, and many of storage specialist SGI's media customers are at the cutting edge of these techniques.

Special effects usually account for between 10 and 13 per cent of SGI's business, and a number of leading studios are using storage and visualisation technology to create film graphics.

Tippett Studio in California has been specialising in special effects for more than 20 years. Founder Phil Tippett worked on the original Star Wars movie before breaking away to form his own company.

During the next 10 or so years, Tippett Studio contributed to a range of famous films, including Robocop and Jurassic Park.

The studio began to move into computer-generated graphics and, over the past five years, has tended to work on up to seven projects simultaneously. SGI's storage power has been integral to its work.

"The need for storage power is difficult to predict," said Tippett Studio chief technology officer Dan McNamara. "It's so project-based and people are encouraged to clean up old files."

The film data is stored on an SGI TP9500. Different storage systems are managed using SGI's CXFS shared filesystem software.

Recent films that have benefited from the input of Tippett Studio include Matrix Revolutions, The Ring and Gladiator. Its experiences with SGI have left Tippett Studio keen to add greater storage capability in the future.

BAE Systems
BAE Systems develops leading-edge technology for some of the word's most advanced military projects, including the Eurofighter. The company has helped develop the aircraft and it is the prime contractor for the Royal Navy's two new aircraft carriers.

Software development at BAE is a data-intensive activity that involves more than 10,000 systems software engineers. And the aerospace giant has turned to grid technology to help staff process information more efficiently.

The company has teamed up with Hewlett Packard, the Institute of High Performance Computing in Singapore, Cardiff University and the University of Wales in Swansea to use grid in aerospace and defence design.

Its aim is to develop practical computing strategies for more efficient management of IT resources.

"We took the lead, and we now have an internal programme to see how we can develop applications," explained BAEgrid project manager Alan Gould.

Over the next few years, Gould hopes that grid computing will become a central element of BAE's business processes. "Grid is about the aggregation of resources to solve a particular problem," he said.

BAE's grid set-up uses a broad range of resources. Linked hardware includes server clusters, distributed desktop PCs and enterprise storage systems. The grid also makes use of bespoke engineering software and HP's external virtualisation applications.

Initial results show the projected gains in efficiency from the technique. Using grid for an in-house design project, for example, highlighted potential licence savings of up to 50 per cent. It also showed that the length of the production process could be cut by almost a third.

Formula 1
Storage systems are helping Formula 1 teams design groundbreaking cars. During a season, F1 teams redesign 80 per cent of their cars, which often include as many as 3,500 components.

Rival teams British American Racing (BAR) and Renault have chosen network attached storage (Nas) systems for design data. BAR has installed BlueArc Nas, which has brought a six-fold time improvement and has maximised throughput for its computer-aided design (Cad) system.

By early 2002, BAR was running out of space for its Unigraphics Cad data. "Data was on several servers, none with sufficient disk capacity, so there was lots of juggling," explained head of IT David France.

Backup took too long, particularly when UK-based designers interacted with the team at the Japanese Grand Prix. BAR opted for BlueArc's Nas system because "it fitted into our architecture and had the performance".

Renault, meanwhile, has moved from smaller to larger NetApp filers. The team, which was already using an almost full NetApp 7400 filer, opted to introduce NetApp's FAS960 because it needed to store up to 6TB of data.

The FAS960 interacted with database software and loaded Cad diagrams 60 per cent faster than the previous infrastructure.

NetApp's 24x7 support was important, as was its ability to move to a storage area network if required, according to Graeme Hackland, IT manager of Renault F1.

Other F1 teams use different types of storage systems, and the BMW Williams F1 team has improved its high-resolution aerodynamic modelling of cars with an HP Linux supercomputer cluster.

The company has added several hundred HP ProLiant Intel-based servers to its Oxfordshire headquarters. The main reason behind the team's decision to expand its supercomputing resource was the need to reduce the time taken to perform a complete analysis for a given size of model.

The team selected the technology that gave it the biggest reduction in total analysis time.

The 2004 Olympic Games
Managing the information of a global sporting event is a Herculean task. In all, the 2004 Summer Olympic Games will require between two and three times the IT power of the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Atos Origin's contract to provide and manage the technology for the Games is the world's largest sports-related IT deal. The contract, awarded in 1999, covers last year's Winter Games, Athens 2004, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin and the Beijing Games in summer 2008.

Each event has an IT budget of $300m (£166m), a combined budget of $1.2bn (£666m). And Atos Origin has deployed 900 servers to help store data from thousands of devices across the event site.

The IT provider is wiring up a range of communication devices, including 10,000 computers, 23,000 desktop phones, 13,000 cellular devices, 9,000 two-way radios and 2,500 internet terminals. These devices transmit information between Athens' 33 competition and 10 non-competition venues.

IT systems and services are managed in the Technology Operations Centre, which is the hub of Atos Origin's technology organisation.

"This is the war room of the Games," explained executive vice president Jean Chevallier. "It's where the key people are and where everything is monitored, including crisis management and interfaces with our partners."

A PC factory ensures that all equipment is properly configured and secured prior to placement at the Olympic venues, including 400 Unix servers and 460 Intel servers.

And when the Games go live in August, a team of about 3,400 IT professionals and volunteers will manage all IT systems and services.

The 2004 Games will boast 28 sports organised into 37 disciplines and 300 events. Atos Origin is transferring many of the technologies used at Salt Lake City to Athens.

"We don't reinvent the wheel," said Chevallier. "The core systems and procedures for people to operate will be the same."

Atos Origin is working with a consortium of technology suppliers, including Swatch, Xerox and Kodak, to provide applications, accreditation, integration and support services.

"It would be a mistake to believe that all these processes are technology-based," said Chevallier. "Humans are vital and all these people working together is like an orchestra."

Weta Digital
Digitising special effects for Middle Earth's dwarves and hobbits requires a high level of innovation and a big chunk of storage.

Visual effects specialist Weta Digital provided groundbreaking techniques for merging digital and live-action footage for Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

The images for these effects had to be scanned and stored for manipulation, and a single frame could represent anything up to 12MB.

For three years, storage provider NetApp worked alongside Weta to develop a system capable of coping with such high levels of data input.

Key issues for Weta included scalability and speed of data delivery, because the special effects specialist's 143 graphic artists were required to work on millions of scanned images.

As well as providing the storage for the film's special effects, NetApp also helped store the data for the movie's website.

Nasa
Storage technology can have applications even beyond the frontiers of Earth. Think Nasa and its missions to the outer reaches of our solar system. Think of Neil Armstrong taking his giant leap for mankind, or Mars Exploration Rover beaming back beautiful images of the Red Planet.

Nasa's Ames Research Centre in California has contributed to explorations of space since 1958. The centre, in the heart of Silicon Valley, is a hive of groundbreaking research and innovation. One area of important research concentrates on the climate modelling of other planets.

Nasa relies on powerful computing resources for much of this research, and storage specialist SGI provides visualisation technology to help the space agency undertake it.

"As we take more landers to Mars, we need to understand the weather. This requires supercomputing and virtualisation," explained Dr Tony Colaprete, a space scientist specialising in Mars climate at Nasa Ames.

"If we ever send humans, they'll need to know atmospheric conditions and they'll need to know the weather."

Colaprete maintained that advances in supercomputing by companies such as SGI have helped push scientific modelling forward. "Climate modelling has come into its own in the past few years," he said.

"We're working towards using high-end computing to make the calculations. It takes several days to work out the weather trends for Mars, but it would take months on a normal computer."

Colaprete and his colleagues aim to run long-term studies that analyse the climate of the Red Planet over the past 20 years.

"That means pushing out the computational power, and newer explorations will increase the need for more visualisation facilities," he said.

Nasa already has supercomputing facilities for its space missions, and it used SGI supercomputers to study and select potential landing sites for Spirit and Opportunity, the Mars Rovers, in early 2004.

Space agency scientists and engineers used four SGI Origin 2000 series servers, driven by a total of 302 processors, for descent analysis and trajectory studies.

SGI visualisation technology is also helping Nasa engineers safely pilot the Rovers over Mars's rocky terrain, as they compensate for communication time lags of up to 20 minutes.

"Imagine having a phone conversation based on the same principles of time delay," said David Morse, public affairs director at Nasa Ames.

"We want to create a rover where there's more artificial intelligence, with an instant response to direction."

Back on Earth, Nasa Ames uses SGI's reality centre technology to display the agency's achievements to the general public.

The new Nasa Ames Mars Centre gives people the opportunity to view the latest high-resolution Mars images and panoramas downloaded from Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

Engineers at the lab receive 168 separate photographs from each Mars Rover, and stitch these together to create panoramas that can be displayed across the screen. The images are so large that they contain more than 50 times more detail than previous Nasa panoramic images.

SGI has written a special utility to read these images so that they fit the theatre format of Nasa Ames' Mars Centre.

The display at the centre measures 14 feet tall and 36 feet wide, and has a curved radius of 22 feet, the measurements having been custom-designed to SGI specifications.

For interactive content, such as real-time navigation, the Mars Centre uses SGI visualisation technology and is powered by an SGI Onyx 350 server.

Nasa Ames' efforts to better understand and represent space form only part of the picture, however, and much of the centre's research focuses on our home planet.

Research includes encouraging safer and more efficient air travel, the long-term sustainability of the Earth's natural resources, and climate forecasting.

"The primary model we're working on right now is ocean circulation. We want to produce global sets to create long-term, climate modelling," explained Dr Chris Henze, a computational physicist at Nasa Ames.

The organisation uses an SGI 512 processor Altix supercomputer for climate modelling work.

"We're trying to optimise codes and exploit the full power of the machines so that we can capture trends such as hurricanes and global warming," said Henze.