We’ve talked before about Yash Raj’s “Roadside Romeo” animation, and another press release has come out revealing that the rendering was actually performed on Asia’s fasted supercomputer, CRL’s ‘Eka’ system.
So you have 32 servers per rack; each server with Dual Intel Xeon quad core 3 GHz CPUs with 16 GB of RAM and a total of 57 populated racks. If you are good at number crunching here’s some more- essentially each server has 8 CPUs and each rack has 256 CPUs.
The ‘Eka’ system was able to reduce render times from 35-40minutes per frame, to 5minutes per frame.
Update: Just wanted to point out that, in my experience with such render technologies, the Eka probably didn’t actually reduce render times down to 5minutes per frame. Rendering is naively parallel most of the time, meaning that you can render each frame with no knowledge of other frames. With a system like Eka, they were probably able to render 8-9x as many frames simultaneously, giving them something akin to a 7-8x speedup on frame renders. Each individual frame took just as long, they were just able to get 8x as many frames simultaneously.
That is an interesting comment, but wanted to give you a bit of insight on some of the other tests at CRL. On benchmarks have been run on a frame-frame basis it has been proved that ‘eka’ is around 50 – 60% faster. Would be more than happy to share the results in case anyone is interested.
Cheers.