C .O.R.E. Feature Animation Creates First Animated Feature Film, on IBM BladeCenter

C .O.R.E. Feature Animation Creates First Animated Feature Film, on IBM BladeCenter

IBM announced today that C.O.R.E. Feature Animation has successfully completed its first animated feature film in a studio run exclusively on the IBM BladeCenter platform. Released worldwide in April, “The Wild” took a team of 300 animators from C.O.R.E. Feature Animation three years to create. C.O.R.E. decided to use an IBM blade platform for its rendering farm to help provide the flexibility, scalability and performance it needed to render the film on time and on budget. By completion C.O.R.E. estimates they generated nearly 15 million HD frames for “The Wild” using IBM BladeCenter.

In 2003, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation landed the opportunity to produce animation for Disney’s “The Wild.” In a matter of weeks the studio needed to ramp up production on the film and be able support a crew of 300 animators. C.O.R.E. also needed to replace its proprietary UNIX-based operating systems running on a mixture of Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) and generic white box servers, with a more scalable, high performing platform.

“The ability to scale production rapidly once investor backing for a film is secured is critical to entertainment business. Animation studios like ours must run in real time, and have the technology infrastructure to support on demand scalability and high performance rendering of large volumes of data in a stable, secure and rapid fashion,” said Matt Welker, CTO, C.O.R.E. Feature Animation. “Blade servers allow us to generate copious amounts of digital content at unheard of speeds in a cost-effective manner.”

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