Infortrend Storage Supports Animation Super Computer to Produce This Winter's Blockbuster Movie
Framestore's in-house High Performance Computing Cluster plays key role in delivering animated feature film The Tale of Despereaux for Universal Pictures

London, 19th December 2008 – Framestore, the Oscar winning animation and computer generated imagery studio, has just completed its first full length animated feature, "The Tale of Despereaux" for Universal Studios, using its in-house developed high performance computing system for the rendering of the images. This system was made up of a 200TB clustered Linux file system closely coupled to a 6000 core render farm. Production data was mirrored on a second 400TB cluster, all of the data storage was based on Infortrend EonStor storage systems.

"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. We were very keen to use RAID 6 to give us extra resilience. We selected Infortrend's EonStor storage systems as they gave us the capacity and flexibility we needed. Having used Infortrend products for the last ten years we were confident we could trust them for this critical project," said Steve Prescott, Technology Director, Framestore.

The creative team had been briefed to achieve a unique look for the Tale of Despereaux, inspired by the Dutch Masters. To meet the required deadlines animation proceeded alongside the development of the processing needed to render this final look. This parallel approach increased storage and render farm demands as many intermediate stages of production data had to be retained to avoid unnecessary animation rework whilst fine tuning of the lighting effects and colour proceeded.

"80% 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," said Prescott. He continued, "With this capacity we believe we are, by some margin, running the most powerful CGI render farm in Europe."

The storage cluster technology used is Lustre, the open source Linux cluster file system, which combined with the open architecture of the Infortrend storage arrays, and server hardware from HP and Dell, provided Framestore with a completely scalable infrastructure. At the peak of production the cluster was using 4700 of its 6000 cores for work on the Tale of Despereaux – with other projects still running in parallel. The processor cores are split across 1000 Dell servers each core having 2 GB of RAM. 

"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," said Jon Ashley, Director of Marketing Communications, Infortrend Europe.

Framestore had a crew of 278 working on the feature; the investment in man hours over the two full years of production was immense. The team generated 90 million files, over 200TB of data in total. To safeguard this investment Framestore mirrored and snapshot the primary storage, installing its own dark fibre 10Gb/s network between its three Soho production offices and a London Docklands data centre to enable the entire project to be replicated and backed up across multiple locations each day. 

Editors Notes

Tale of Despereaux facts and figures:

• Framestore commenced preproduction on The Tale of Despereaux in 2006
• There are 40,089 individual assets in the film
• 25 hero characters were modelled, surfaced and textured, as well as 12 secondary characters
• 60 hero environments were modelled, surfaced and textured
• There are 413,138 hairs on Despereaux's head
• 1726 final shots were delivered
• The film has 126,248 frames altogether
• The biggest delivery in one week by the team was 335 shots
• 1200 shots were delivered during the  last month of production
• At its peak, the crew size reached 278

The Tale of Despereaux will be in cinemas from 19th December 2008.

About Framestore

Framestore is the largest visual effects and computer animation studio in Europe, with over 20 years of experience in digital film and video technology. Employing over 800 staff, the company works out of three buildings in London's Soho district, with another office based in New York.

2008 has been a landmark year for Framestore, with the company winning both the Oscar and BAFTA for our VFX work on The Golden Compass. Over the years, the company has won numerous international awards including two Technical Oscars, three BAFTA Craft Awards and thirteen Primetime Emmy Awards. Recent film projects include: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, The Dark Knight,Quantum of Solace and Australia.

In 2006, Framestore set up a feature animation division, with the aim of producing our own digitally animated films. The first of these, The Tale of Despereaux, has been in full production since 2007, and opens worldwide from December 19th 2008.

About Infortrend

Infortrend, the networked storage expert, is a pioneer in cost-effective, high performance storage products. The company provides EonStor® storage subsystems and SANWatch® software for virtually all storage interfaces including Fibre Channel, SAS, iSCSI, SCSI and SATA. For over a decade, Infortrend has provided reliable, fault-tolerant technology to prominent ODMs, distributors, and storage integrators worldwide. The company's core competency includes performance optimized RAID ASICs, feature-rich firmware, and redundant, high availability RAID subsystems. Founded in 1993, Infortrend is traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange (Taiex), ticker number 2495. For more information, visit www.infortrend.com.

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