Alien insects threaten human life, thanks to ATM

Pittsburgh, 10 November 97 Millions of moviegoers sat riveted to their seats as hordes of marauding alien insects threatened the future of the human race. While audiences rooted for the Federal troops as Starship Troopers invaded theaters on November 7 in the USA, the real stars are the bugs. The film features the most elaborate special effects ever created for a movie, including more than 220 shots involving the warrior insects created by Tippett Studio, which utilized high-performance ATM network products from FORE.

Tippett Studio and co-producer Phil Tippett, who won Oscars for his work on Jurassic Park and Return of the Jedi, were charged by Sony Pictures Entertainment and TriStar Pictures with bringing the fearsome creatures that populate Robert Heinlein's sci-fi novel to life in just 59 weeks. Tippett had to build a new facility, triple the size of its special effects operation and install a high-speed network linking departments to meet the film's creative requirements and ambitious timetable.

Tippett's network, located in Berkeley, California, links a total of 165 Silicon Graphics (SGI) Indigo II Extreme workstations, a Challenge S renderfarm, and Macintosh OS machines that run digital film I/O, modeling, painting, technical direction, animation, 3-D match move, motion input, compositing, rotoscoping and software development applications, tying the machines to one another and to three SGI Challenge production servers. While each department is housed in discreet areas, the network is configured as a single, high-bandwidth cloud that enables machines to communicate without passing through the servers and allows production teams to be created as needed to work on individual effects.

The ATM network is anchored by two ForeRunner ASX-1000 ATM switches and two ForeRunner ASX-200BX switches running an OC-3 backbone at 155 Mbytes per second. The ForeRunner switches form a single cloud for running ATM to the Indigo II Extreme and Challenge S workstations, which are equipped with ForeRunner ATM adapter cards. A FORE PowerHub 7000 LAN switch connects the Macintoshes to the network via 10BaseT (10 Mbytes per second) switched Ethernet, with multiple FORE ES-3810 LAN switches providing 100BaseT (100 Mbytes per second) to SGI O2 workstations. Tippett's three SGI servers-two Challenge XLs, Challenge L-are equipped with multiple load-sharing ATM interfaces and are connected directly to the OC-3 backbone.

Sandra Wermer