Future animations from Dreamworks SKG will not be rendered on its own servers anymore, but outsourced to Cerelink, the studio announced. The company said that it will use Cerelink’s supercomputing infrastructure at the New Mexico Applications Centre (NMCAC). The advantage over its own supercomputers is the availability of supercomputers on demand, a feature that is commonly referred to as elastic cloud computing.
Whiel Cerelink is not among the first names you may think of when you talk about cloud computing, it has several thousand square feet of secure data centre space in Rio Rancho,New Mexico and access the superfast LambdaRail broadband network. Cerelink said it can provide a peak performance of 172 TFlops on an Altix-bases supercomputer with 14,336 Intel Xeon cores.
Apparently Cerelink has already passed its first tests, as it was used to render parts of Shrek Forever After and How to Train Your Dragon earlier this year. With Dreamcast on board, Cerelink said it expects to grow its computing capacity by 20x by the end of next year and focus on a cloud supercomputing facility for the movie production industry.
Given the fact that the quality of animation films improves at a breathtaking speed, it seems to make only sense that companies such as Dreamworks SKG are thinking about cloud computing solutions. And cloud computing centers may be offering a whole new incentive that makes movie production even cheaper: New Mexico is apparently offering a tax incentive for movie studios to do their rendering there. A whole new market is evolving, with Amazon also offering HPC services now. A range of services developed by ELC are developed for Amazon’s EC2 and I invite you to check it out. It is a fascinating area that is maturing quickly and is offering entirely new opoortunities for businesses.