Movie premieres like DreamWorks Animation's "Puss in Boots," are more known for the red carpet appearances of actors like Antonio Banderas and Salma Hayek and less known for the efforts of the animators and computer technicians who bring these 3D movies to life.
However, at least one unsung hero got its moment of glory on the red carpet for the premier of "Puss in Boots:" The Z800 Workstation.
See, DreamWorks Animation can't make their movies without HP technology. Over the past decade, HP technology has played an integral role in movies like, "Shrek," "How to Train Your Dragon," and "Kung Fu Panda 2." For Puss in Boots, artists used 200 HP Z800 Workstations along with the billion-color HP DreamColor Monitors to create complex cloudscapes, the furry cast and everything in-between.
The animator's set up:
THE Z800 WORKSTATION :
• Two Intel (Westmere) Xeon X5670 2.93 GHz 6-Core Processors (for a total of 12 cores)
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0
• nVidia Quadro FX4800 graphics card
• 24GB RAM
• Two 300GB 15000rpm SAS Drives
KEY PERIPHERALS:
• 24" DreamColor Color Accurate Display – 1900 X 1200
• 24" Stereo Display – 1900 X 1200
• Wacom Cintiq tablets
Beyond what's on their desks, HP also provided the networking backbone through HP Cloud Services. Out of 63 million rendering hours, eight million were rendered using HP Cloud Services.
Headed to the movies this weekend? Raise your soda to the developers and animators – as well as all that horsepower running in the background.
Darren "Gizmo" Gladstone is the Blogger-in-Chief and PC Paparazzi for HP's TheNextBench.com.
