Pixar Picks SAN to Drive Cars

Byte and Switch has an article about how Pixar rendered and processed their latest feature film, Cars.

They talked with Pixar’s VP of technology, Greg Brandeau, to find out more.

Brandeau says that Cars has put more internal strain on his systems than any other Pixar film to date, ‘…swallowing up a colossal 2,300 CPU years over the course of the last five years. In other words, in Brandeau’s view, a single CPU would have to run for 2,300 years in order to do all the number crunching for this movie.’ says the article.

Here are some more facts about the movie and its processing…

– it used 300 times more compute power to make than Toy Story
– 1 gigabyte of memory wasn’t enough on their server heads. They had to use something in the region of 32 gigabytes.
– After to switching to a SAN, Pixar cut its rendering times from 10 hours per frame (which should have been normally 1, but the frames created so much stress on the servers, it just didn’t happen), down to 1 hour per frame.

To find out more about Pixar’s switch to SAN, click here.