Next 7: Crest Animation Studios

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Crest animation studio is a decade old and has given some path breaking concepts to the Indian Animation industry, such as Morphing. It does a lot of 3D animation work for international clients. Creating 3D animations requires lots of processing power. As  the number of such jobs  increased, Crest was under pressure to deliver them on time. Even though they used multiple state-of-the-art, high end servers, the time taken for production was very long, taking anywhere between 8 to 24 hours, leading to lots of unproductive time for the creative workforce.

Business problem  To render more minutes of animation in lesser time
IT solution High Performance Computing- Render Farmmanaged by application called RenderMAX
Implemented by In-house Team
Technology platform  Linux and OpenSource
	P Krishna Prasad Head IT, Crest Animation Studios

They deployed a high performance cluster, rather a rendering farm with 35 servers, called Render Units connected together over a 10Gbps network, with an application middleware to convert them in to a single virtual processing unit. They supported 64-bit  computing, which could address more than 4 GB of both virtual and physical memory. The servers could be regrouped depending upon the type of animation project. Each cluster had a master node for job scheduling and storage node for storing the files required for rendering, as well as the rendered output. To manage the clusters, the team developed their own system called RenderMAX, which is a combination of scripting routines, Open Source grid engines, and striped-off Linux kernels. The work process is easy for the animators. They copy their work files to the storage node from the central SAN storage and schedule the job using the RenderMAX job submission web interface.

The deployment has obviously significantly reduced the rendering time. The team tried ran the linpack benchmark on it, and they got a whopping speed of about 690GFlops.

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