Grid Technology - Case Study

Sun Helps Animation Company Find Available Compute Resources, Easily and Cost-Effectively

The world of digital special effects is constantly concerned with the time and effort it takes for animators and technical directors to create many versions of various shots and farm these shots off to be rendered frame by frame for review. Since "rendering" is such a compute-intensive task, finding the available computing resources and distributing the work effectively can end up being tremendously time consuming. "Our scripts had to be manually tweaked for each and every render to run on various machines," explains John Coldrick, senior animator/V.P. at Axyz Animation, Inc.. "The available machines and CPUs were constantly changing and required monitoring. Our process was very inefficient and error prone--animators and technical directors were constantly waiting for render tests."

Based in Toronto, Ontario in Canada, Axyz Animation is a small- to mid-sized company that produces digital special effects. Unlike large animation shops, where having a "render farm solution" is a necessity, for smaller shops it's not an economical option to have a custom-made solution. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf packages do not typically work acceptably in the animation environment, therefore most large animation shops have solutions that are written from the ground up.

"What we needed was a flexible solution that didn't require re-inventing the wheel as far as distributed processes went, and yet was flexible enough for us to implement things the way we wanted," explains Coldrick. After extensive research, Coldrick read about Sun ONE Grid Engine software developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc. He continues, "What we discovered in Sun Grid Engine software was a remarkably robust, flexible, and scalable product that fit our needs like a glove. In fact, due to the scalability of Sun Grid Engine software, it would easily work as a solution for the larger animation shops as well."

After switching to Sun ONE Grid Engine software, Axyz animators could submit any process--animation or render--with the same command. "Animators don't have to be concerned about what machine is available, or massaging their scripts to maximize speed," explains Coldrick. "Every available CPU in our farm is put at their disposal, and jobs that typically took a whole night in the past can often run in a fraction of the time. Bottlenecks are a thing of the past."

Sun ONE Grid Engine software works by enabling companies to submit and manage jobs from just about any Linux or UNIX® system on the network. It does this by monitoring the availability of workstations, then deploying jobs to the available resource. Additionally, the command line utility gives the company the flexibility to script and automate jobs as well as build a custom front end. And the GUI provides the business a convenient management tool for administering the Sun ONE Grid Engine software. "We've been able to implement application-specific licensing scenarios, such as applications that will run multi-threaded on one machine without an additional token penalty," says Coldrick. "This helps utilize all of our CPUs to their maximum. By taking the significant technical task of managing distributed processing off my plate, I was free to focus on an implementation that worked for our needs."

Sun ONE Grid Engine software can be set up in three different environments depending on the company's requirements. The Cluster Grid includes one group using the Cluster Grid. The company could have multiple Cluster Grids set up in different locations. The Enterprise Grid includes multiple groups sharing compute resources. And the third environment, the Global Grid, includes multiple geographically dispersed groups sharing compute resources. In Axyz's case, they used the Cluster Grid environment.

"I was able to set up a single group Cluster Grid in approximately two weeks of spare time after regular working hours--not very long at all," continues Coldrick. "I wrote script wrappers that not only allowed our staff to use language that was familiar to them, but allowed us to adapt to the specific requirements of the applications that we run." In addition, Axyz was able to easily write utility scripts that were tailored to its everyday tasks because of the open nature of the Sun ONE Grid Engine software.

Axyz picked up a short-term project to work on a TV pilot for ABC. For this pilot, they were asked to generate a demanding 120 shots in three weeks. To accommodate this project, Axyz easily developed a second Sun Grid Engine software group. "I set up a second Sun ONE Grid Engine software group for that short time, and combined with a powerful production pipeline that we developed, we were able to bring in quality work, on time, on budget, and without killing any of our staff," explains Coldrick. "Without Sun ONE Grid Engine software this could not have been possible, since in such an incredibly short time having to haggle with managing something as mundane as render management would have killed the project."

All in all, Sun ONE Grid Engine software has freed up significant amounts of time for Axyz animators, and let them focus on what they do best--animate. "In addition, turnaround time for tests has dropped significantly, allowing for more refining in the same amount of time," concludes Coldrick. "Human error has also dropped, as there are far fewer scripts that need to be edited to get the job done. We couldn't be happier."