Toy Story 2 to be rendered by Pixar on Sun systems

"We chose Sun as the rendering platform for our mission-critical film productions because their systems are reliable and easy to maintain," said Greg Brandeau, vice president of Computer Operations for Pixar Animation Studios. "Using Sun technology and powerful CPUs, we're able to produce a richer, more complex film in a shorter amount of time."

In order to create the complex and richly animated frames necessary for a feature-length animated film, Pixar needed a solution with the ideal combination of power, performance, flexibility and compact size. They found it with Sun. The solution includes 120 Sun Enterprise 4500 servers, each powered by Solaris and configured with 14 UltraSPARC II< processors, delivering an aggregate total of 1,680 processors. Each of these processors can work on one frame of the film at a time. This results in improved rendering time compared to linear rendering with a supercomputer, and it also provides easier network manageability compared to using a comparable number of processors in separate PCs. In addition, the Sun renderfarm enables Pixar programmers to fit the compute power they need into a single machine room, saving precious real estate.