To increase productivity and system utilization and reduce costs in the process of designing and distributing digital visual effects for commercials, television and feature films, Axyz Animation has achieved distributed rendering across a Linux-based compute farm using SunTM Grid Engine software with Houdini's 3D software solution. Houdini is one of the first professional 3-D applications with production-proven support for Sun Grid Engine software.

Using Sun Grid Engine software and Houdini software has enabled Axyz to cost-effectively distribute jobs to and from Linux systems, eliminating pipeline bottlenecks, increasing server utilization rates to nearly 95 percent and cutting production time in half. The combination of the low-cost Linux platform with Sun Grid Engine software, which is available as a free download, offers animation studios like Axyz Animation the technology necessary to increase productivity and system utilization while keeping IT expenditures to a minimum.

John Coldrick, Senior Animator, VP, Axyz Animation, stated Axyz needed a flexible solution. "What we discovered in Sun Grid Engine software was a remarkably robust, flexible and scalable product that fit our needs like a glove. Animators don't have to be concerned about what machine is available, or massaging their scripts to maximize speed. Every available CPU in our farm is put at their disposal, and jobs that typically took a whole night in the past can often run in a fraction of the time. Bottlenecks are a thing of the past."

"Sun's vision and worldwide leadership in grid computing for the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE) and the Linux platform can help businesses of all sizes be more competitive in the deadline-intensive industry for animation and digital content creation," said Fred Kohout, director of marketing for Technical Market Products at Sun. "Sun's Grid Engine software product family is the clear market choice with more than 5,000 grid deployments to date. As businesses discover the direct impact that grid computing can make to their bottom line, Sun's open grid architecture approach will provide the robust grid solutions these new markets require."

http://www.sun.com/grid

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