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Penguins, Animal Logic, and Blades
And the Oscar goes to… Happy Feet ! Perhaps you saw Happy Feet,
the motion picture that won the 2007 Oscar for best animated fea-
ture. The movie included animated shots of groups of thousands of
picture-perfect Emperor penguins, including Mumble, a young
penguin with an uncanny ability to dance.
Happy Feet is the brainchild of George Miller with animation by
Australia's Animal Logic. Happy Feet was Animal Logic's first full-
length animated movie, although the company had its hand in
many other popular films including the Harry Potter series, Moulin
Rouge, the Matrix trilogy, and The Lord of the Rings.
If you did see Happy Feet, you were sure to be impressed by
the detail of the photo-realistic animation. For example, the star of
the film, Mumble, had 6 million picture-perfect feathers. Several
shots included more than 400,000 realistic-looking penguins. This
type of artisanship requires processing power, and lots of it.
Animators at Animal Logic realized that they would require
more processing power than the company currently owned.
Producing 3-D animated films requires a process called render-
ing, where defined 3-D objects in a scene, along with the lighting,
shadings, shadows, and reflections, are created on a computer
based on commands from the artist and the laws of physics.
Happy Feet required the rendering of 140,000 frames, with each
frame taking hours to render. Using a PC, one rendering of the
film would take around 17 years. Xavier Desdoigts, director of
technical operations at Animal Logic, calculated that nine months
of production would require 17 million CPU hours. Animal Logic
turned to IBM for help.
IBM installed a rendering server farm built from blade servers,
each containing two processors—2,000 of them for a total of 4,000
processors. The installation of the system posed some challenges.
The density of the blade centers that housed the servers produced
a higher amount of power consumption and heat generation than
standard servers. Animal Logic had to work with IBM to create a
suitable environment for the system. IBM provided management
tools that allowed one technician to handle the day-to-day mainte-
nance of the system. Desdoigts says, “Sometimes we forget that
we have 2,000 CPUs doing their job every day. There's one person
who looks after all of them.…But that's what we were aiming for. It
was part of choosing a vendor that could provide that level of ser-
vice and support so we could focus on creating movies. We didn't
want to get bogged down in technology issues; it just had to work
every day.”
Animal Logic's new system gives it the power of industry lead-
ers like Pixar and Sony Pictures. Happy Feet proved to be a great
leap into the big league for Animal Logic, grossing more than
$41 million on its opening weekend, and beating out the top-tier
companies for an Oscar.
Discussion Questions
1.
Why did Animal Logic want a system that was easy to
maintain? How did this requirement contribute to the
company's ability to meet its goals?
2.
Purchasing a 4,000-processor blade server required a
huge investment from Animal Logic and a leap of faith. How
do you think they justified the expense?
Critical Thinking Questions
1.
The IBM Case Study on which this article is partly based
states that “in specialized areas such as weather forecasting,
scientific and financial research, and digital media production,
there can never be enough processing power.” Why do you
think this is?
2.
Based on what you have read in this chapter, why do you think
IBM recommended blade servers instead of other types of
servers for Animal Logic's needs?
SOURCES: Rossi, Sandra, “And the Oscar goes to ... jovial penguins and 2,000
blade servers,” Computerworld, March 6, 2007, www.computerworld.com/
action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&taxonomyName=Serve
rs_and_Data_Center&articleId=9012400&taxonomyId=154&intsrc=kc_li_
story. Staff, “Animal Logic builds rendering farm with IBM eServer
BladeCenter,” IBM Success Story, October 11, 2005, www-01.ibm.com/
software/success/cssdb.nsf/CS/MCAG-6H2SR2?
OpenDocument&Site=corp&cty=en_us. Animal Logic Web Site,
www.animallogic.com, accessed January 12, 2008.
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