PUNE, INDIA: The rendering of India’s first 3D stereoscopic animation feature film ‘Alpha and Omega’ hit the ‘pack-up’ hour last week. But it marks the birth of stronger, faster and smarter technology-pack for sure.

The protagonist of which is India’s very own supercomputing star ‘Eka’ from CRL, who this time donned a new character and effortlessly got under the skin of its new role called ‘Cloud’.

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For Crest Animation Studios, it was a new spotlight altogether. In conjunction to its own infrastructure, Crest used the high-performance computing infrastructure at CRL to accelerate its rendering schedule by about five months.

CRL’s supercomputer ‘Eka’, which was used in this project made it possible for Crest to reduce their render times per frame by about 50 per cent and increase throughput by approximately 500 per cent without proportional cost implications.

‘Eka’ so far is known as one of the world’s fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 Trillion sustained calculations per second, but in this project, it took a new leap by using cloud platform and giving the process a new height, scale and speed this time.

As A K Madhavan - CEO, Crest Animation Studios tells, “Doing everything on-time and on-budget was a challenge for this project and that called for huge computing power. We did have outsourcing as an option but our country has its own advantages so why not tap them?

And that came with the attractive possibility of remote rendering. So we chose that and finished the project with wonderful results.”

The results are out for everyone to see. The movie has clocked outstanding number of eyeballs in its first week itself and clocking the 9.2 million dollar mark in the opening week, Madhavan couldn’t be happier. “Amongst the independents, we have done very well.”

Yes, we are not talking about the Pixars or Disney’s here but supercomputing and that too harnessed on cloud is what the present era is about to be.

In a media report sharing highlights of a report done by UC Berkeley Reliable Adaptive Distributed Systems Laboratory (aka RAD Lab) published as Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing." we have already seen how cloud would be redefining the storyboards of animation next.