HP recently announced that DreamWorks Animation used HP technology to develop cutting-edge animation for its latest film, Turbo, which debuts in theatres in July.
HP Converged Infrastructure technology spanning servers, storage, networking, services and management software; HP Converged Cloud; and HP Workstations and printers helped DreamWorks Animation process massive amounts of data, creating new levels of imagery and powering innovative computer graphics (CG) animated movie-making techniques.
“DreamWorks Animation’s strategic alliance with HP ensured that we had the high-performance computing, continuous availability and streamlined management capabilities needed to accurately depict Turbo’s dream of becoming the world’s fastest racer,” says Derek Chan, head of Technology Global Operations, DreamWorks Animation.
“HP’s advanced Converged Infrastructure portfolio enabled our artists and engineers to create the highest-quality picture possible.”
DreamWorks Animation tapped the power of HP Z Workstations to recreate the thrill of the Indy 500, with a snail travelling 220 miles per hour and more than 500 000 crowd characters filling a replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
HP Z800 and Z820 Workstations, powered by Intel Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors, enabled artists to execute iterations 50% faster than previous workstations and develop increasingly complex camera angles and special effects. When not in use by creative teams, workstation processing power was used to run night time rendering jobs, contributing to the millions of compute hours needed to produce the movie.
Integrated with HP Workstations, HP Remote Graphics Software – a free HP Workstation tool – enabled animators to collaborate more efficiently across geographies by viewing ideas and assets on a single display.
HP FlexNetwork architecture solutions enabled DreamWorks Animation to increase performance, reduce latency between global studio locations and provide constant availability to support faster rendering and review times while boosting animator productivity.
HP Networking provided animators with access to a central repository of assets, simplifying collaboration by allowing artists to easily share and retrieve resources across all locations. In addition, the highly reliable network infrastructure allows creative teams to work anytime from anywhere, with production spread across studios from Glendale and Redwood City, Calif., to Bangalore, India.
The production of Turbo required 75-million render hours to create fully realised images, including 32 Indy 500 race cars and 32-million crowd character instances, the most of any DreamWorks Animation film to date.
DreamWorks Animation utilised HP Enterprise Cloud Services to provide a robust, scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that offers the additional compute power needed to render the 10 CG films that are in production at any given time.
HP Enterprise Cloud Services, part of the HP Converged Cloud portfolio, enables DreamWorks Animation to meet growing business needs while remaining within its existing data centre footprint.
To handle the rendering demands of Turbo, DreamWorks Animation relied on the high-performance computing capabilities of HP ProLiant Generation 8 (Gen8) servers.
HP ProLiant Gen8 servers increased render throughput by approximately 40% and performance per watt by approximately 42% allowing DreamWorks Animation to render an average of 500 000 jobs a day to ensure that the studio had the compute power to complete the production on time.
DreamWorks Animation also leveraged HP Enterprise Services to provide a robust, scalable, cloud-based infrastructure that addresses a company’s aggressive data needs.