Shrek 2 boosts HP's utility vision
Shrek 2 boosts HP's utility vision
HP has got animated about utility computing by providing Dreamworks with the use of its Utility Rendering Service (URS) to allow the company to manage the enormous amount of power needed to render high-quality film animation for the production of films such as Shrek 2.
Dreamworks has worked closely in collaboration with HP to create this system, and it has also been used for the production of "Shark Tale" and "Madagascar", which will be released soon too.
Dreamworks and HP created the Virtual Studio Collaboration (VSC) project together to address the need to connect geographically dispersed teams and provide unprecedented levels of collaboration capabilities.
Shane Robison, chief strategy and technology officer, HP said. "As a partner to DreamWorks, HP's goal is to deliver technologies and like VSC, which free the artistic spirit, improve the collaborative process and cut production costs. Together, the two companies will continue to evaluate technology synergies to enhance DreamWorks's reputation as one of the world's leading animation studios."
Nick van der Zweep, director of virtualisation and utility computing for HP said that this is a perfect example of how useful utility computing can be at the highest level.
"As the economy looks set to pick up over the next two or three years, companies will be looking to invest in utility computing and virtualisation to save money and manpower. We recently interviewed 700 companies and half of them said they are seriously thinking about integrating virtualisation software into their business over the next few years.
"This is because businesses are interested in consolidation and linking different storage areas from different departments into one pool, so that less space is wasted and information is more tightly integrated."
"This recent example with Shrek 2 highlights how utility computer can be used to move resources around dynamically with reliability under a high pressured environment."
The HP URS was built using a 1,000-processor compute farm built on industry-standard systems, including HP ProLiant DL360 servers running Linux and HP ProCurve network switches.
It is linked via a secure, high-speed network to DreamWorks Animation studios to provide an extension of DreamWorks' internal data centre. This adaptive enterprise environment allowed DreamWorks the flexibility to add significant peak capacity for the final stages of rendering "Shrek 2".
It is also the first time a major film animation company has gone outside its gates for a significant share of the critical digital rendering process that adds colour, texture, lighting and special effects to 3D character models and scenes.
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