HPCwire: Rendering in the Cloud... or Not

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June 02, 2008

Rendering in the Cloud... or Not

by Michael Feldman, HPCwire Editor

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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.

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