HPCwire: Rendering in the Cloud... or Not

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

HPCwire >> Features

June 02, 2008

Rendering in the Cloud... or Not

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

The democratization of digital content creation may be getting closer. Sun Microsystems and the Blender Institute have completed a proof-of-concept project that resulted in the production of a short animation feature using Sun's Network.com compute grid. The idea is to demonstrate how animation developers can make use of on-demand computing and Blender software, an open source content creation suite, to create professional looking 3D animation.

The animation feature movie created by the collaboration -- "Big Buck Bunny" -- runs about ten minutes and according to the guys at Sun, took about 50,000 CPU-hours to render on their x86-based grid. At the standard Network.com cost of $1/CPU-hour, that would have run the developers $50K. But for the purpose of the demo, Sun donated the compute time. Blender is one of Network.com's hosted applications, but because it's open source software, it doesn't incur an additional licensing fee.

The YouTube video of the movie is below. If you have decent network bandwidth, a higher quality version can be downloaded from the movie website.

I spoke with Craig Hubbar, Network.com's group marketing manager about the animation project. According to him, with the Blender-Network.com offering, Sun is looking to tap into a whole new range of content creation users and markets. He says the setup allows all sorts of creative people to get access to the kind of high powered rendering platform that was previously only available to big animation studios. Smaller studios, film schools, designers, and advertising organizations that currently can't afford to buy and maintain expensive computing infrastructure may see rendering on-demand as the way to go.

"It's really the market that we think may end up grabbing on to this and using it in very innovative ways," said Hubbar.

The on-demand platform can also be used to create feature length films. But at the standard Network.com burn rate, a 100 minute feature film would cost around half a million dollars, although with a tight rendering workflow, you might be able to do it for a quarter of that.

This is the first animation feature produced by the Blender Institute team. The Institute is a division of the Blender Foundation, the group that developed the Blender software. Campbell Barton, the team's technical director wrote about how the feature was rendered on the Sun grid, noting a few problems along the way:

One of the big advantages of Sun's service is they use a 64bit operating system. This means Blender can use more than 2 gig of ram, which is really important to render characters with millions of hairs. Other offers for rendering only ran 32bit systems.

On the flipside, Network.com hadn’t ever been used for rendering anything on this scale, so the admins at Sun weren’t familiar with problems related to this task. Peach [the movie's code-name] is a good way to stress their systems infrastructure.

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Top Headlines

GP-GPUs: OpenCL Is Ready For The Heavy Lifting

Mar 11 | Linux Magazine | CUDA may be the rage, but OpenCL is a standard that has some features you may need. Read more...

Can Free Software Drive the Fourth Paradigm?

Mar 09 | Free Software Magazine | Data-driven computing will need open software. Read more...

Graphics Card Maker Turns to High-Performance Bioinformatics

Mar 09 | Bio-IT World | Tahoe Informatics founder eyes GPUs, CUDA software. Read more...

CFD: Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Mar 08 | Sporting Life | Formula One engineers differ on benefits of CFD. Read more...

AMD Tries to Draw Intel Into Chip Battle

Mar 08 | InfoWorld | AMD offers up 48-core server prize. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html