Morph Magazine

Crest Animation employs TATA CRL‘s ‘eka‘ Supercomputer for ‘Alpha & Omega‘

by on Sep.28, 2010, under Animation

Crest Animation Studios has announced completion of rendering of India‘s first 3D stereoscopic animation feature film ‘Alpha and Omega‘, which was released on 17th September. This was completed in record time using ‘eka‘ supercomputer at Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons. This is the first time an Indian studio has taken on the top global animation studios on their own turf by releasing the movie in screens across US and Europe, and marks yet another milestone in the Indian Animation industry.

With “Alpha & Omega” Crest Animation Studios becomes the first studio in India to have co-produced a full length 3D stereoscopic Animated feature film for the global CGI market. It is a momentous achievement for Crest as well as for the Indian Animation Industry. Crest believes that with the release of its first animated feature film the global CGI markets would definitely look at India as a high on value destination for CGI products and services

In conjunction to its own infrastructure, Crest used the high-performance computing infrastructure at CRL to accelerate its rendering schedule by about 5 months. CRL‘s supercomputer ‘eka‘, which was used in this project, is one of the world‘s fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 Trillion sustained calculations per second. ‘eka‘ made it possible for Crest to reduce their render times per frame by about 50% and increase throughput by approximately 500% without proportional cost implications.

A K Madhavan, CEO, Crest Animation Studios said, “Rendering of an animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. With CRL‘s infrastructure it was possible for us to plan for an early release during Cannes Film Festival in May 2010. Their strong expertise in delivering on-demand high performance computing (HPC) and their dedicated support services proved to be a cost-effective alternative to investing in additional infrastructure.”

S Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL said, “CRL‘s High Performance Cloud provides one of the fastest rendering infrastructures available globally. It provides a highly cost effective solution backed by a cloud based business model where the customer only pays for what he uses. CRL has been able to quickly ramp up and down the infrastructure to best suit a customer‘s immediate needs. With CRL, customers get to focus only on the creative part of the production process – that which they do best – and leave computing worries to us.”
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Dr Vipin Chaudhary, CEO, CRL said, “Using our On-Demand remote rendering cloud solution, infrastructure will no longer be a constraint in the ability of Indian studios to think big and make their mark around the globe. Small and medium sized studios can now take much larger projects without worrying about investing in the costly rendering hardware solutions and maintaining them 24 x 7. Additionally the highly secure computing facility has implemented the best data security processes so that our customer experiences complete peace of mind with regard to his data. Our scale of operations makes the computing cost much more affordable than in-house computer infrastructures.”

CRL has now started talking to studios in Europe and US. Going ahead, several Hollywood flicks would be powered by an Indian – for the first time, a machine – supercomputer ‘eka‘.


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