A Sun Success Story
When Blue Sky Studios set out to create a realistic, computer-generated world full of dinosaurs and other characters for its upcoming film Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, it knew it needed to expand its computing capacity. The company's proprietary CGI Studio software -- a programming language and renderer used to describe, manipulate, and visualize 3-D elements -- had previously been deployed on AMD Opteron-based Angstrom blade servers.
The Blue Sky R&D Department worked on the film for approximately 12 months, slated for release in July 2009, which meant the studio needed to implement additional functionality and render more digital content in a shorter time frame. Blue Sky also wanted to increase their level of support.
The State of Blue Sky Technology
"Our Angstrom servers were aging, and the processors were no longer delivering the performance capabilities we needed," says Carl Ludwig, Chief Technical Office at Blue Sky Studios. "We wanted to do a lot more with our software, and we needed more powerful systems to run our rendering application. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs was the first time Blue Sky Studios and Fox Animation was delivering a stereoscopic or 3-D film, something that would require higher-performance processing," added Ludwig.
The Challenges
Sun was called upon to help Blue Sky Studios meet several important challenges:
- Increase application performance to enable the introduction of new rendering techniques including stereoscopic
- Meet demanding production schedule for new film, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs
- Reduce server footprint for new headquarters
- Improve production tools to allow employees to be more creative
The company was also planning a move to new headquarters, and the space and energy footprint of any new technology was important. "Our calculations relative to what would be needed were very critical in our new building and space relative to the footprint that would be required in power and cooling," says Keane.
The Blue Sky Process
Blue Sky evaluated solutions from HP, Angstrom and Sun. After talking with Sun, Blue Sky decided to participate in the Sun Try and Buy program for the Sun Blade X6250 Server Module. Soon after testing the technology, Blue Sky knew it had found the right fit for its CGI Studio software. "Clearly, going with a Sun solution allowed us to very specifically design a layout of the data center, and know that we would get a substantial increase in price/performance and footprint -- and it's proved to be quite successful," added Keane.
Another factor in choosing the Sun solution was the Intel Xeon processor 5400 series, which powers the Sun Blade X6250. "The architecture of the Xeon processor 5400 series was very appealing to us," says Ludwig. "CGI Studio is a huge compute engine, and we saw that the multi-core Intel Xeon processors were faster than what we had been using, because of the caching scheme."
Blue Sky Business Results
The studio's designers now have powerful new design tools to help them create film images in significantly less time. Benefits include:
- Increased application performance by four times, allowing artists to leverage new techniques to produce richer, more realistic results in less time
- Smaller server footprint resulting in reduction in power and cooling energy
- Increased design team productivity
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The Results
By December 2008, Blue Sky had implemented 10 Sun Blade 6048 Chassis, comprised of 480 Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules, each with two Intel Xeon processors 5220 series, and 120 Sun Ultra 24 Workstations, along with Sun's Enterprise Installation Services. When the studio's crew began working with the new solution, they experienced much higher performance from the company's CGI Studio software. "Performance was four times as fast with the Sun and Intel solution, compared with our previous servers," says Ludwig. "So our team realized they could render digital frames much faster and create more frames in less time than before. Their personal productivity has improved significantly."
The Sun Solution
Blue Sky Studios teamed with Sun to deploy a new solution that includes Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules that run on Intel Xeon processors 5400 series. The company also deployed the Sun Blade 6048 Chassis and Sun Ultra 24 workstations. The configuration includes:
- Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules
- Sun Blade 6048 Modular System
- Sun Ultra 24 Workstations
- Sun Try and Buy program
- Sun Enterprise Installation Services
Price/Performance Matters a Lot at Blue Sky
"In evaluating technology partners for a rendering solution, the focus was clearly on price/performance. The return on investment is allowing our artists and technology directors to use the hardware to the best of their abilities, and be more creative. With Sun and Intel technology, we'll continue to make beautiful films, but with that much more visual representation."
Brian Keane
Chief Operating Officer
Blue Sky Studios
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Sun's technology allowed lighting artists to try more computationally-intensive techniques such as radiosity, which gives a much richer, more realistic result, and provides the ability to turn these iterations overnight. Keane added, "Blue Sky's vision is to have our CGI Studio software and Sun hardware do the 'heavy lifting' to allow the artists to be more creative. The Sun/Intel platform gives us more bandwidth and power for CGI Studio to deliver what you see on screen."
The Benefits
Also, the Sun Blade X6250 Server Modules have a compact design, which is what Blue Sky Studios was seeking for its new studio space. "The X6250 takes up much less space than our previous servers did, and we needed that smaller footprint," confirms Ludwig. "We will use less energy on power and cooling as a result."
The new Sun and Intel solution's combination of performance and price has better enabled Blue Sky Studios to produce cutting-edge animated films. "Sun has a strong reputation for engineering, and it shows when you work with these products," says Ludwig. "Technology like this, priced as well as it is, brings a lot of value to our company and what we do."
Blue Sky Studios is also pleased with the technology support it is receiving from Sun. "We're very happy to be working with Sun again," Keane says. "Sun has the right combination of price, performance, and power for us. They have great quality products and we saw that the Sun support would be great, and that was a key part of the decision for us. We have a lot of faith in Sun's engineering as well as in Intel's processor architecture, and I'm hopeful that our relationship with these two top technology companies will grow even more."
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