Farming For Pixels

For Pixar's "Cars" each movie frame took 10 CPU-hours for the final render. The movie is 116 minutes long x 24 frames per second, that's a huge chunk of calculations (10 x 24 x 60 x 116 = 1.7 million CPU-hours). Fortunately they have a large "RenderFarm" that does this work massively parallelized. They buy a brand new farm for each feature film and they cost tens of millions of dollars.

Here's a description of the Incredibles RenderFarm...

"Pixar's new RenderFarm, used to create the digital images for each frame of animation in its movies, will consist of 1024 Intel Xeon processors inside of eight new RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar's own RenderMan software. The RenderFarm features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space. Each Intel Xeon processor at 2.8 GHz is about five times faster than the older RISC-based processors in Pixar's outgoing RenderFarm. Pixar is using the system for its film, "The Incredibles", scheduled for a 2004 release."

This was 2003, eons ago in the computer landscape. Can you imagine what they have now?