Crest Animation associates with CRL for ‘Alpha and Omega’ rendering

By Bollywood Hungama -

September 20, 2010 - 12:27 PM IST

Mumbai based Crest Animation Studios has announced its association with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL), for rendering Alpha and Omega, India's first 3D stereoscopic animation feature developed by Crest. The announcement was made at a joint press conference in Pune on 18th September.

Crest Animation associates with CRL for ‘Alpha and Omega’ rendering

The film Alpha and Omega, which was released on 17th September this year, was completed in record time using 'Eka' supercomputer at CRL, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.

As the studio claims, this is the first time an Indian studio has taken on the top global animation studios on their own turf by releasing the movie in screens across US and Europe, and marks yet another milestone in Indian Animation industry.

In conjunction to its own infrastructure, Crest used the high-performance computing infrastructure at CRL to accelerate its rendering schedule by about 5 months. CRL's supercomputer 'Eka', which was used in this project, is one of the world's fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 Trillion sustained calculations per second. 'Eka' made it possible for Crest to reduce their render times per frame by about 50% and increase throughput by approximately 500% without proportional cost implications.

A K Madhavan, CEO, Crest Animation Studios said, "Rendering of animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. CRL's strong expertise in delivering on-demand high performance computing (HPC) and their dedicated support services proved to be a cost-effective alternative."

S Ramadorai, Chairman, CRL said, "CRL's High Performance Cloud provides one of the fastest rendering infrastructures available globally. CRL has been able to quickly ramp up and down the infrastructure to best suit a customer's immediate needs.

Vipin Chaudhary, CEO, CRL said, "Using our On-Demand remote rendering cloud solution, infrastructure will no longer be a constraint in the ability of Indian studios. Small and medium sized studios can now take much larger projects without worrying about investing in the costly rendering hardware solutions and maintaining them 24 x 7."

CRL has now started talking to studios in Europe and US. Going ahead, several Hollywood flicks would be powered by an Indian - for the first time, a machine - supercomputer 'Eka'.