Pixar Builds Massive Intel-Racksaver Renderfarm

Pixar Builds Massive Intel-And Racksaver-Based Renderfarm

Pixar Animation Studios, the Academy Award*-winning creator of “Toy Story” and “Monsters, Inc.,” today announced that it is working with Intel Corporation and RackSaver to create one of the most powerful computer installations ever used for digital animation.

Pixar’s new RenderFarm, used to create the digital images for each frame of animation in its movies, will consist of 1024 Intel® Xeon™ processors inside of eight new RackSaver BladeRack supercomputing clusters running Pixar’s own RenderMan® software. The RenderFarm features two terabytes of memory and 60 terabytes of disk space.

Each Intel Xeon processor at 2.8 GHz is about five times faster than the older RISC-based processors in Pixar’s outgoing RenderFarm. Pixar is using the system for its film, “The Incredibles,” scheduled for a 2004 release.

About Pixar Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq: PIXR, www.pixar.com) combines creative and technical artistry to create original stories in the medium of computer animation. Pixar has created four of the most successful and beloved animated films of all time: Academy Award®-winning “Toy Story” (1995); “A Bug’s Life” (1998); Golden Globe-winner “Toy Story 2” (1999); and the Academy Award-winning “Monsters, Inc.” (2001). Pixar’s four films have earned more than $US1.7 billion at the worldwide box office to date. The Northern California studio’s next three film releases are “Finding Nemo” (May 30, 2003), “The Incredibles” (holiday 2004) and “Cars” (holiday 2005). -- more --

About Intel Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is also a leading manufacturer of computer, networking and communications products. Additional information about Intel is available at www.intel.com/pressroom.

About RackSaver RackSaver, Inc. is a world-class provider of high-density individual rack-mounted computer servers and supercomputer clusters, high-density computing solutions, computing systems as well as other software integration services. The company’s state-of-the-art servers and supercomputer clusters primarily utilise the Linux operating systems, the fastest growing segments of the server market. The company also offers servers with the Microsoft Windows* XP and Windows* 2000 operating systems.

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