HP Converged Infrastructure Solutions Help Dreamworks Animation
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HP Converged Infrastructure solutions help DreamWorks Animation create great films and blaze a path toward Instant-On Studio turns to HP technology to deliver more than 60 percent greater throughput and help break new ground faster than ever. “DreamWorks utilize about 5 percent of its rendering capacity from the cloud. In 2011, we intend to move more than 50 percent of our rendering capacity into the cloud.” Ed Leonard, CTO, DreamWorks Animation SKG Objective Popcorn, please Boost rendering throughput while minimizing It is one of life’s most universal pleasures: enter a power consumption and streamlining data center movie theatre, sit back in a comfortable chair, watch a requirements screen, and be swept away. DreamWorks Animation SKG delivered this an Approach unprecedented three times in 2010. Out of tens of Onsite testing showed that HP server blades, thousands of titles released in over 100 years of storage, networking, and cloud services would cinema, two DreamWorks Animation movies (Shrek boost efficiency and defer power capacity 2 and Shrek the Third) are among the top 25 all-time upgrade. highest-grossing films.* There are plans at DreamWorks Animation IT improvements to set more records—and the studio • More than 60% greater rendering throughput needs more acceleration from • More than 30% higher performance per watt technology. • Minimized server administration through remote “We hire people who have management unbounded imaginations,” • Service-level agreements in backup and archiving explains Ed Leonard, met or exceeded CTO, DreamWorks Animation SKG. “Our • Search and retrieval of usable assets in seconds HP customer case study: job as technologists instead of days DreamWorks Animation is to position SKG uses HP servers, technology as a Business benefits storage, networking, creative enabler and cloud services to • Multi-million-dollar data center upgrade deferred as opposed to a accelerate animation • Key enabler to render capacity for an increased constraint to our production and deliver production slate filmmakers’ creativity.” more amazing films to the consumer. • Enhanced creativity from the ability to support more rendering Industry: entertainment *“All Time USA Box Office,” www.imdb.com/boxoffice/alltimegross, visited January 5, 2011. “Every pixel on screen needs to be designed, The overall compute capacity at DreamWorks approved, created, rendered, and lit with specific Animation is getting larger and larger, and room for intention,” says Leonard. “Everything is created from the imagination is getting bigger. pure imagination in a computer graphics movie. And that’s why we’re so reliant on compute and our More than 60 percent greater partnerships with Intel and HP. You can only put as rendering throughput much on screen as the compute capacity allows.” Approaching deadlines made the animation technology team evaluate four or five options for What’s next? increasing compute capacity, Chan explains. “We To keep up with those creative imaginations, started to draw up all kinds of plans to move servers DreamWorks Animation keeps increasing demands on around, shift the load, and look for new data center its compute capacity, with space at other locations,” he notes. “Meanwhile, • Bigger movies. The original Shrek used six terabytes testing in our environment showed that HP ProLiant of data. How to Train Your Dragon, nine years later, BL460c G6 Server Blades with Intel Xeon processor used over six terabytes for a single sequence—more 5500 series have a total throughput more than 60 than 90 terabytes in total. percent greater than the Intel Xeon processor 5400 • More movies per year. As the largest animation series, the previous generation.” studio in the world, DreamWorks Animation A key factor behind the gain is the improved memory currently produces an average of five films every bus architecture in the Intel Xeon processor 5500 two years. series, Chan points out. • Stereoscopic 3D. As seen in DreamWorks Animation’s most recent release, Megamind, “We hire people who have unbounded stereo 3D is the best way to experience computer- imaginations. Our job as technologists is to animated films. This new standard was championed position technology as a creative enabler as by DreamWorks Animation and has set a new opposed to a constraint on our filmmakers’ bar for the high-quality theatrical experience. It creativity.” requires separate images for each eye, which boosts Ed Leonard, CTO, DreamWorks Animation SKG rendering requirements by 30 percent. • Ever-more-ambitious artistic visions. Filmmakers keep seeing new possibilities as technology evolves. Avoiding a multi-million-dollar These challenges add up infrastructure upgrade The overall effect is that the studio produces more The new G6 servers are also more energy-efficient, movies each year—as many as 12 are in production Chan adds. “With our render loads, HP ProLiant G6 at any one time—and each title requires more data, server blades deliver 30 percent better performance more creativity, and more rendering. As a result, per watt than the servers they compute capacity was needed fast—and available replaced,” he notes. “We’ve power at the studio’s Glendale, California data center been able to defer a was running out. multi-million-dollar infrastructure upgrade Then HP introduced the HP ProLiant G6 server blades that would have with the Intel® Xeon® processor 5500 series. added electrical The results need to be seen on screen. How to Train capacity to Your Dragon, Shrek Forever After, and Megamind our Glendale were all released in 2010. campus. And we’ve “We did Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) on the previous added generation of hardware,” explains Derek Chan, head headroom of digital operations at DreamWorks Animation. “But that has with three movies with significant schedule overlap enabled us and that were all 3D, we couldn’t have done them to take on projects such as rendering a TV special in without the power of Intel’s Xeon processor 5500 addition to our movies.” series and HP’s ProLiant servers.” 2 Boosting creativity with faster The detail is astonishing. In one scene, a character with superpowers hurls an entire skyscraper at rendering a foe. The building flies through the air and then Faster results enable more creativity, notes Lincoln slides like a missile across the ground toward the Wallen, head of R&D at DreamWorks Animation. camera, generating a dust cloud calculated in more “Tying together multiple server blades is a key step than 13.5 billion discrete locations. In other scenes, toward the ability to do more interactive rendering massive crowds are important. To make them real, and visualization,” he explains. “Until now, there’s DreamWorks Animation used HP computers to fill been a fairly long turnaround time from when an artist a plaza with nearly 60,000 animated people, creates the description of what they want their scene individualized by simulating more than 5,000 types to look like to when they can actually realize their of clothing. vision on the compute farm.” The wait has been cut. “Using a ‘mini-farm’ of servers, Three ways to grow lighting artists can re-shade a part of their scene in a To be able to deliver this level of detail on tight matter of seconds to minutes, as opposed to hours or deadlines, DreamWorks Animation turns to three Company days,” Wallen notes. strategies for sourcing compute capacity. profile Turnaround times will get even faster as DreamWorks One is a converged infrastructure solution based About DreamWorks Animation developers re-architect their toolset to take on HP servers, with a migration underway to HP Animation advantage of next generation parallelization using networking (from core to edge) and dynamic storage. DreamWorks Animation Says Derek Chan: “DreamWorks Animation has creates high-quality multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The result, Wallen entertainment, including says, is that “earlier in production, we’ll be able invested in making sure that our infrastructure is CG animated feature films, responsive to our business. That has meant moving television specials and series, to animate in higher resolution and have a fully lit live entertainment properties environment. This is something we don’t do today until from a siloed world of IT where you had workstations and online virtual worlds, the end. Now we animate a few characters at a time and servers and network and tools to a world in which meant for audiences around that’s all converged together, and it can be integrated the world. The Company has in a very sparse environment.” The change will give world-class creative talent, artists the opportunity to realize the director’s vision and packaged as a service back to our business.” a strong and experienced management team and much more rapidly. Teams at the company’s northern and southern advanced filmmaking California and India sites are no longer isolated, technology and techniques. Making bigger dreams real DreamWorks Animation has Leonard points out. HP Halo Telepresence and been named one of the “100 Already, artists are adding far more detail to scenes videoconferencing solutions enable them to work as if Best Companies to Work For” than they have been able to do in the past. The they were sitting across from each other, manipulating by FORTUNE® Magazine original Shrek, released in 2001, required five for three consecutive years. the same application. Also, where it once took them In 2011, DreamWorks million CPU render hours. A decade later, Megamind three months to switch artists between films, a common Animation ranks #10 on consumed 54 million render hours—a 10-fold the list. All of DreamWorks platform now gives them the flexibility to switch Animation’s feature films increase. immediately. are now being produced in 3D. The Company When creative teams can put more detail onscreen, has theatrically released they can surprise audiences with new levels of Clouds are the future of rendering a total of 21 animated vividness.