In this summer's box-office attraction "The Hulk," mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner morphs from an ordinary guy into a phosphorescent green, bulging super power - part hero, part monster who makes moviegoers cower in their seats. Terrified viewers have the visual-effects experts at Industrial Light & Magic to thank for their racing pulses. And just as Banner has been supercharged with gamma radiation, those ILM artists have been empowered with a hulked-up network.

In March, ILM brought two 10G Ethernet modules - for its Foundry Networks BigIron Layer 3 backbone switches - into its already bandwidth-intensive enterprise network architecture. A Foundry shop since 1999, ILM uses seven BigIron switches (five 8000s, one 4000 and one 15000), about 40 FastIron II - plus a handful of FastIron II+ - closet switches, and more than 80 FastIron 4802 stackable switches, says Raleigh Mann, manager of network operations at the San Rafael, Calif., post-production company.

No time for massaging data

The BigIron modules are linked via a 10G trunk, with throughput speed of 8G bit/sec because of limitations of Foundry's current architecture, Mann says. (Foundry addresses the throughput limitations in the BigIron MG8, a terabit switching and routing platform introduced in April.) This 10G trunk serves as the conduit from ILM's production network, on which sits all of the artists' render processors and file servers, and the data center. Previously, Mann handled the bulkiest of data transfers by trunking together multiple 1G BigIron ports.

Of course, ILM artists know little of 10G or any other network technology. All they know is that they can create ever-bigger data sets that move swiftly across the network. They demand nothing less, Mann says.

"Every 18 months, our work follows Moore's Law. As computers get cheaper, disk space gets cheaper and our productions can move faster," he says. To make The Hulk and other movie creations realistic, ILM artists pour on complex textures in increasingly dense simulations. "More horsepower doesn't mean we can just work faster; it means our work can get more complex. Fabric, hair, water, flame, smoke, sand - we can basically simulate more particles and render a much more complex 3-D image, " he says, emphasizing that the network has to keep up. "Our artists know the slightest difference in network performance."