Facing a looming deadline and a legacy IT infrastructure that just wasn't delivering the goods, Blue Sky Studios, a wholly owned subsidiary of Fox Filmed Entertainment, turned to Sun for the solutions that made it possible to deliver "Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs" on time and with the promised quality.

"Performance was four times as fast with the Sun and Intel solution, compared with our previous servers," says Carl Ludwig, Blue Sky CTO. "So our team realized they could render digital frames much faster and create more frames in less time than before. Their personal productivity has improved significantly."

Blue Sky replaced the legacy AMD Opteron-based Angstrom blade servers in its "render farm" with 10 Sun Blade 6048 Chassis, comprised of 480 Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules, each with two Intel Xeon processors 5220 series, and 120 Sun Ultra 24 Workstations, along with Sun's Enterprise Installation Services. This complement of Sun solutions enabled Blue Sky to perform the computer generated imagery (CGI) animation it is noted for and to do so at a lower real estate and lower power cost than before.

Furthermore, according to Brian Keane, Blue Sky COO, "The return on investment is allowing our artists and technology directors to use the hardware to the best of their abilities, and be more creative. With Sun and Intel technology, we'll continue to make beautiful films, but with that much more visual representation."

Not only did the Sun technology enable Blue Sky to do things faster, it also provided lighting artists to explore new, more computationally-intensive techniques such as radiosity, which gives a much richer, more realistic result that enables the studio to turn these iterations -- which had previously taken much longer -- overnight. Says Keane, "Blue Sky's vision is to have our CGI Studio software and Sun hardware do the 'heavy lifting' to allow the artists to be more creative. The Sun/Intel platform gives us more bandwidth and power for CGI Studio to deliver what you see on screen."

As noted earlier, Blue Sky appreciated savings in both real estate and power consumption costs with the new Sun technology. CTO Carl Ludwig noted that, "The X6250 takes up much less space than our previous servers did, and we needed that smaller footprint. We will use less energy on power and cooling as a result."

With an eye to the future, COO Brian Keane says, "Sun has the right combination of price, performance, and power for us. They have great quality products and we saw that the Sun support would be great, and that was a key part of the decision for us. We have a lot of faith in Sun's engineering as well as in Intel's processor architecture, and I'm hopeful that our relationship with these two top technology companies will grow even more."

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Rendering Using HPC Technologies [...read more...]

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