Earlier this month French HPC and IT company Bull announced that its servers handled the rendering for the 3D animated movie Planet 51
The Planet 51 project was born in 2002. Since then, Ilion Animation Studios has created an entire parallel universe around Planet 51 using leading-edge technologies. The result is an incredible visual experience which cannot be compared with any other animated film. Over 350 people from more than 20 countries worldwide have worked on Planet 51 – including designers, developers, engineers and many other professionals – with a budget of some $70 million.
…The Extreme Computing solution provided by Bull consisted of a cluster including computing nodes and a management node, connected to the storage system and other Ilion servers via an Ethernet Gigabit network.
Bull has proven expertise in Extreme Computing and in the implementation of Microsoft’s Windows HPC Server, a platform which is characterized by its high capacity for parallelism and its Job Scheduler system.
Within a month, the Bull supercomputer was ready to run, thanks to the involvement of a team of a dozen specialists from Bull France and Spain. The solution was clear proof of the high level of technological expertise of the team involved in the project.