OIL & GAS

IBM announced today that C.O.R.E. Feature Animation has successfully completed its first animated feature film in a studio run exclusively on the IBM BladeCenter platform. Released worldwide in April, "The Wild" took a team of 300 animators from C.O.R.E. Feature Animation three years to create. C.O.R.E. decided to use an IBM blade platform for its rendering farm to help provide the flexibility, scalability and performance it needed to render the film on time and on budget. By completion C.O.R.E. estimates they generated nearly 15 million HD frames for "The Wild" using IBM BladeCenter. In 2003, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation landed the opportunity to produce animation for Disney's "The Wild." In a matter of weeks the studio needed to ramp up production on the film and be able support a crew of 300 animators. C.O.R.E. also needed to replace its proprietary UNIX-based operating systems running on a mixture of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) and generic white box servers, with a more scalable, high performing platform. "The ability to scale production rapidly once investor backing for a film is secured is critical to entertainment business. Animation studios like ours must run in real time, and have the technology infrastructure to support on demand scalability and high performance rendering of large volumes of data in a stable, secure and rapid fashion," said Matt Welker, CTO, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation. "Blade servers allow us to generate copious amounts of digital content at unheard of speeds in a cost-effective manner." IBM helped C.O.R.E. implement 36 IBM BladeCenter chassis, housing 500 dual-core Intel Xeon-processor based blade servers from IBM, running Red Hat Linux V7.3. The scalability, density and sheer processing performance of the systems helped C.O.R.E. render over 70 furred and feathered characters and over 300 crowd characters across 97 sets, for over 1400 shots and a total of 122,400 frames. At peak, C.O.R.E. was rendering the equivalent of a movie and a half every week in the amount of frames generated. The BladeCenter system also enabled C.O.R.E. to save up to 25% in energy costs, with its advanced power and cooling technology. "When we set out to develop "The Wild" we needed the foundation of a cutting-edge technology infrastructure to support our animators," said John A. Shaw, rendering supervisor, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation. "IBM BladeCenter provided us with 1,000 rendering nodes and enabled us to use Linux, key to supporting our use of Pixar's RenderMan software and our in house pipeline. At that time IBM was the only vendor offering a complete working solution for our rendering hardware needs." "In the business of digital rendering and animation, a good scalable business model with key technology is critical to keeping production on schedule and on budget," said Doug Balog, vice president and business line executive, IBM BladeCenter. "With an IBM BladeCenter-based solution, animation artists can rely on the flexibility, power and reliability of the technology infrastructure, and focus on doing what they do best--animate, create and entertain."