Box Office weds Cloud

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.

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It talks about how animation rendering is worth the spotlight and how an average animated movie is an ideal candidate for cloud computing as the task can be spread across many machines and the load is transient.

This is because there is a finite amount of time rendering goes on: at some point the movie must be released, ending the need for rendering until the next movie comes down the pike.

Something which can’t be explained by a better expert than Vipin Chaudhary - CEO, CRL. Remote rendering is fairly unique in this domain, he describes.

“We have seen 40 per cent increase in performance and 500 per cent throughput effect. What was interesting was scalability and elasticity of the whole exercise. Ramping up and ramping down as per demand was not a problem. Remote rendering requires a lot of change to software and to pipeline. People in animation can seamlessly use a cloud platform.”

With this, CRL has proven that they are now a full-service cloud option and not just a pit stop for computing resources. Domain expertise, ability to work with customer workflow and high-speed rendering over the cloud, is the new set of capabilities, he adds.

CRL also allied in a research consortium with University at Buffalo, SUNY. That would mark evolving HPC (High Performance Computing) to new dimensions, as Chaudhary comments.

“It would focus on data-intensive computation. The kind of algorithms you need today for certain problems are different from traditional HPC.”

CRL has now started talking to studios in Europe and US. Going ahead, several Hollywood flicks would be powered by an Indian — for the first time, a machine — supercomputer ‘Eka’.

CRL also leveraged ‘Eka’s  HPC muscle for a movie before.

That movie was also nominated by Hollywood-based Visual Effects Society (VES) for delivering outstanding animation. “Roadside Romeo”, India’s pioneering CGI animated theatrical contemporary entertainment movie made by Yash Raj Films competed with the likes of “Bolt” (Walt Disney Pictures), “Kung Fu Panda” (DreamWorks Animation), “Wall-E” (Disney-Pixar), and “Waltz With Bashir” (Sony Pictures Classics).

The movie used Eka's supercomputing colours to a great extent. For CRL (Computational Research Labs), a Tata Sons' wholly owned subsidiary, that achieved the fourth rank globally and first in Asia in supercomputing's top league, the movie production time was possible to trim to one fourth of a time otherwise taken.

Large-scale compute clusters are used to render the more than 100,000 frames in a feature film and with several films in production in the pipeline at any given time, come forth enormous computational requirements.

Normally, it's in the second half of production when HPC becomes significant. |

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It’s another ball game altogether for this movie, Chaudhary says.

“What you get for one application is different from another. That’s when scientific expertise is important since everything is on the same infrastructure and performance. Optimising the code is what makes one team different from another.”

3D rendering is the 3D Computer Graphic process of automatically converting 3D wire frame models into 2D images with 3D photorealistic effects on a computer. Rendering is the final process of creating the actual 2D image or animation from the prepared scene. Rendering may take from fractions of a second to days for a single image/frame.

The rendering process is computationally expensive, given the complex variety of physical processes being simulated.

Unlike regular photography, however, the scenes being photographed are imaginary, and everything appearing in 3D rendering needs to be created (or re-created) in the computer before it can be rendered. This is a lot of work, but allows for an almost infinite amount of creative control over what appears in the scene, and how it is depicted.

“Rendering of animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. With CRL’s infrastructure it was possible for us to plan for an early release during Cannes Film Festival in May 2010.” Says Madhavan.

With “Alpha & Omega”  Crest Animation Studios becomes the first studio in India to have co-produced a full length 3D stereoscopic Animated feature film for the global CGI market.

CRL is looking ahead for facilitating more blockbusters and even for Madhavan, who is happy saying that it’s the first time both entities have achieved a global deliverable, “the benchmarks keep changing, but they are eager to excel and be challenged again.”

Now that’s clearly what you call ‘Action’!