Creating the Na'vi characters and the flora and the fauna of Pandora occupied over a petabyte of data.
During the production of James Cameron's Avatar (2009), to render the animations, a server farm was set up, deploying 4,000 HP servers, with 40,000 processor cores with 104 TBs of RAM and 3 petabytes of network area storage running Linux, that executed 1.4 million tasks per day, which consisted of processing 8 gigabytes of data per second running 24 hours for over a month.
A new paint software system named Mari was developed specifically for the movie.
Due to the huge amount of data involved, Microsoft had to create a new cloud computing Digital Asset Management (DAM) system, especially for Avatar. It was named Project Gaia.
The Na’vi language was created entirely from scratch by linguist Dr. Paul R. Frommer from the University of Southern California. It contains about 1000 words. James himself added about 30 words to it.