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Pixar Basks in the Sun Fire
Pixar Animation Studios plans to build its next-generation Renderfarm based on Sun's new Sun Fire3800 Midframe servers. The new Renderfarm is expected to boost Pixar's computing power to 2.5 times its current capabilities. This technology enhancement should speed production of "Monsters Inc.," Pixar and Disney's animated feature film set for release November 2, 2001. The announcement was made at the National Association of Broadcasters Conference in Las Vegas.
Sun-based Renderfarms were used on Pixar's three previous films, "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life" and "Toy Story 2."
Pixar's next generation Renderfarm will use 250 new Sun Fire 3800 Midframe servers, each with eight UltraSPARC III microprocessors, 16 gigabytes of system memory and 108 gigabytes of local disk space, giving Pixar 2,000 processors in production and nearly four terabytes of main memory. An additional cluster of Sun servers will function as a model server and will offer an additional 10 terabytes of storage. Plans call for all 250 servers to be operational by June 2001.
For more information, visit www.sun.com.