Pixar Animation Studios will build its next generation Renderfarm based on Sun's new Sun Fire 3800 midframe servers. The new Renderfarm is expected to boost Pixar's computing power to 2.5 times its current capabilities. This technology enhancement should speed production of "Monsters Inc.," Pixar and Disney's animated feature film set for release November 2. The announcement was made at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas.

Sun-based Renderfarms have been a key component of Pixar's three previous films, which include "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story 2." According to Ed Catmull, President, Pixar Animation Studios, "The performance of our Sun-based Renderfarms through the years has been flawless. In a business where delay can mean disaster, Pixar's decision to upgrade our Renderfarm to Sun Fire Midframe servers illustrates our confidence in Sun's ongoing commitment and ability to provide products and solutions that will help us deliver top quality products on time."

Pixar's next generation Renderfarm will use 250 new Sun Fire 3800 Midframe servers, each with eight UltraSPARC III microprocessors, 16 gigabytes of system memory and 108 gigabytes of local disk space, giving Pixar 2,000 processors in production and nearly four terabytes of main memory. An additional cluster of Sun servers will function as a model server and will offer an additional 10 terabytes of storage. Plans call for all 250 servers to be operational by June 2001. [...read more...]

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