Alright guys, before I get started on this article, I have to say that ‘Despicable Me’ is a great movie! You MUST watch it in 3D because it’s awesome. And now, we have another reason to watch it: “It’s green!”

Many may not know how Hollywood-size studios usually develop 3D films. It not only involves the actors wearing some odd clothes with spots, and a green background. There’s something bigger than the director’s 3D video cam. It’s the bizarre server farms. We’re talking about servers with size of 4 to 8 parking spaces. Not only are they big, but they’re smoking hot! That’s why its bloody costly to develop an animated 3D film, as they AC system has to be working overtime to cool down the farms.

Illumination Entertainment, the company behind Despicable Me, though that it’s too costly to run a server farm that size to render their 3D images and the bills is sky high. Not very feasible for their small company. Therefore, they approach IBM to develop a customized server-farm using the iDataPlex system, and cut away the AC system and the sky-high bill. What IBM came out, is a green server that cuts down energy usage by 40% compared to tradition server farms.

The iDataPlex has two key advantages: a flexible configuration that doubles the amount of systems that can run in a single IBM rack and the ability to run an ambient temperature room (no costly air-conditioning required). The system has been on the market for over a year, but Illumination is the first studio to use it for animated film.

This doesn’t mean that any scrappy-coco studio with a big dream can now produce a high-end 3D animated film though. Illumination used a 330-person team of artists, producers, and support staff to produce 142 terabytes of data. And the rendering farm, which processed up to 500,000 frames per week, was built in conjunction with Mac Guff Ligne, a French digital production studio.

But the iDataPlex gives Illumination a leg up in the graphics rendering process. Illumination Entertainment’s server farm, for example, is the size of four parking spots. That’s half the amount of space the company initially allotted to the farm.

Oftentimes a small studio like Illumination really wants to put their energy behind creating as compelling of content as possible. By minimizing the technological issues associated with building and managing the [rendering] environment, we allow studios to reduce the amount of time, energy, and resources necessary to create an underlying technological platform – Steve Canepa, Vice President, Media & Entertainment Industry at IBM.

It’s a compelling idea for studios—even major ones—that want to cut costs and look environmentally conscious at the same time. IBM is already working with a number of other studios to implement similar solutions. Canepa concedes that studios could build similar systems by purchasing off-the-shelf racks and processors, but the iDataPlex’s unique configuration of servers packs a lot of processing power into a small space—and that’s not easy to replicate. Don’t expect these rigs to be appearing in suburban garages anytime soon.

SOURCE Gizmodo