Crest Animation : Animated about Green

Crest was founded in 1990 as an advertising film production company and
gradually went on to become a prominent player in the VFX and 3D animation
space. One of Indias largest CG production companies today, Crest is widely
acknowledged in India for having introduced animation and special effects to the
Indian market and is one of the first players in the Asian region to service the
mainstream entertainment industry in the UK and the US. Given the complex CG
environment, technology is critical to Crests operations. Today the company has
an unmatched state-of-the-art technological foundation at par with world-class
facilities and has many achievements to its name. Crest has been awarded the
Maharashtra IT Award in 2007 and has been recognized as one of best innovators
of the year in 2006 by Nasscom.

Rendering Green

Crest first embarked on its green IT roadmap about three years ago with the
development of its breakthrough in-house program named RenderMAX, HPTC, High
Performance Grid Computing JobScheduler designed to handle complex production
pipelines using Linux and other operating tools. Rendering is an important
function in the 3D and animation space and this HPC consisting of 500 servers
has been designed and built in house and configured to suit Crests dynamic
rendering needs. Earlier, despite having 385 high-end workstations, even if a
basic rendering activity was initiated on a busy animators workstation it would
take about 2 hours to process it. And when the rendering activity is in process
it consumed 100% computational resources and RAM. Hence, an animator could not
work on his workstation until the rendering activity was complete. This resulted
in loss in productivity within the workforce. Thats when Crest decided to build
a dedicated server farm through RenderMAX to carry out the rendering or compute
activities.

Crest has been working on RenderMAX for the past three years and has managed
to save an average 20% just on electricity costs with the help of the wake-up
LAN or scheduler. In addition, Crest has also gone ahead and virtualized all the
500 servers on the GRID which contributed to cost savings and better server and
storage provisioning. According to Shajy Thomas, head IT, Crest Animation
Studios, server virtualization brought down the additional server capacity needs
of the company by 15-20%.

Building an interface between the GRID, the scheduler, the various multimedia
applications and integrating it with the rendering engines such as MAYA and
Mental Ray was the most challenging task for Crest. While integrating the GRID
and the scheduler was relatively easy as Crest availed of various open source
applications and solutions, integrating the multimedia applications was the
challenging part and that is where all the expertise, experience and efforts of
an experienced team of 25 engineers went in.

Priya Kekre

priyak@cybermedia.co.in