Print

Print


This may be relevant to assessing our scale during the meeting today compared to some large commercial operations:

 http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9237880/DreamWorks_tops_compute_cycle_record_with_The_Croods_


"The new 3D animated movie "The Croods" may be about a stone-aged family, but DreamWorks said it is by far its most sophisticated production to date, topping all others in compute cycle hours.

The movie, out in theaters last Friday, required a whopping 80 million compute hours to render, 15 million more hours than DreamWorks' last record holder, "The Rise of the Guardians." 

Between 300 and 400 animators worked on "The Croods" over the past three years. The images, from raw sketches to stereoscopic high-definition shots, required about 250TB of data storage capacity to make,

DreamWorks' five petabytes of disk storage is tiered, from solid-state drives and volatile cache for high-performance applications

The network connection between its Glendale and Redwood City studios consist of two 10Gbps Ethernet networks with automatic fail over

Those networks are tied into a central hub that offers up to 500MB/sec to artists in Bangalore, India

DreamWorks has a "render farm" of servers made up of about 20,000 processors. The image rendering jobs are broken up into small pieces, distributed out to the server farm, and are later recompiled to create the final images for a film."


It's interesting that they own this kit themselves, rather than outsourcing it.

Cheers

 Andrew