Framestore releases its first full-length animation

IF YOU'VE BEEN WATCHING TV recently you will have seen the trailer for a new animation film, The Tale of Despereaux, yet you might not know that it is Framestore's first full-length animated feature.

The Framestore animation and computer generated imagery studio used its in-house developed computing system for the rendering of the images for what's expected to be this Winter's blockbuster movie.

The system used to create this animation was made up of a 200TB clustered Linux system and a 6,000 core render farm, while the production data was stored on an Infortrend EonStor storage system and mirrored on a second 400TB cluster.

Steve Prescott, Framestore's Technology Director, said, "Producing cinema quality animation generates huge volumes of valuable data. At peak working we were generating 5TB per night, so reliable high performance storage was central to our system design."

Framestore was also keen to use RAID6 for extra data storage resilience. The company selected Infortrend's EonStor storage systems as they provided the capacity and flexibility needed and having used the products for years it knew they were reliable.

"80 percent of the rendering for the film was completed in the last three months of production. We designed the systems to scale. The project started with 50TB of storage which we grew by an additional 150TB as we worked," explained Prescott.

Framestore believes that with this capacity it is running the most powerful CGI render farm in Europe.

In terms of the storage cluster technology, Framestore made use of the open source Linux cluster file system, Lustre. Using that system combined with Infortrend storage arrays and server hardware from Dell and HP made for a completely scalable infrastructure.

Jon Ashley, Infortrend Europe Director of Marketing Communications, said, "Render farms provide one of the most demanding environments for storage systems. We are delighted that Infrotrend EonStor has once again proven to be the optimum choice for performance reliability and value in such a creative project."

The workforce on this film consisted of a crew of 278 who had been collecting 90 million files, over 200TB of data, for two full years.

So, you can think about all of this, if you get a chance to see the little mouse on screen. µ