DreamWorks Animation has just signed a deal with Cerelink to ‘rent’ their cloud computing facilities for use in rendering upcoming projects.  It’s an interesting solution, forgoing the usual kinds of security and access restrictions that Hollywood studios typically require for upcoming films for the lower-cost and elastic nature of cloud computing resources.  So what is DreamWorks getting access to, exactly?

The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.

This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.

This is in addition to state tax rebates of up to 25% for work done in New Mexico, further reducing the costs.  So they effective get access to up to 14000 cores of compute power without having to deal with IT, cooling, maintenance, or any of the infrastructure costs, and only when they actually need it for work.

via DreamWorks signs cloud computing deal • The Register.