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Next 7: Crest Animation Studios

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

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.

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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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