Success Stories

Company Success Stories - Tippett Studio

Tippett Studio Uses AMD Athlon™ MP Processor-Based Appro Servers To Help Its Animated Characters Spring To Life

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Tippett Studio

October 1, 2002

"We built some prototype desktop workstations powered by AMD Athlon™ MP processors. We had tried systems powered by a competitor's processors, and they worked fairly well. However, we absolutely preferred the performance of the AMD Athlon™ processor. A good part of the advantage comes from the performance of AMD's floating point engine, which is very important to compute-intensive operations such as rendering. - Christian Rice, Director of Technology"

Tippett Studio ranks among the elite companies when it comes to providing leading-edge animation and visual effects for today's film industry. Led by founder Phil Tippett, former supervisor of the Industrial Light & Magic Creature Shop, the studio has grown from a modest beginning in Tippett's garage to a full-fledged company of 160 professionals. On the way, Tippett Studio has earned thirty feature film credits and garnered two Academy Awards, six Academy nominations, two Emmys, and four Clio's.

From the studio's founding in 1984 to the present day, they have developed a growing following for their ability to create dinosaurs, ghosts, giant bugs and killer robots that transport movie audiences to worlds ruled by imagination. Current productions include Matrix The Revolutions for Warner Bros., The Santa Clause 2 for Disney, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen for 20th Century Fox, as well as Clio Award winning television commercials for Blockbuster Entertainment and others.

As the Director of Technology, Christian Rice oversees an expansive network of hardware, software and operating systems that enable the studio to deliver amazing images to motion picture and television screens. In the spring of 2002, Rice set out to upgrade the studio's render farm, which consists of multiple computers working to generate frames of the same project at the same time. His research led him to purchase AMD Athlon™ MP processor-based 1U Appro 1124 servers from Appro International.

"We conducted research based on the fact that we needed to at least double our render farm power," said Rice, recognizing that industry norms and customer expectations constantly spiral upward. "The large production companies know what is possible to get accomplished for a reasonable cost, and their expectations are high. We live in a world of short turnaround times and limited budgets, yet are expected to routinely produce never-before seen effects. We have to push the envelope."

For Rice, pushing the envelope meant evaluating new options to replace their existing systems. "Our mentality leads us to examine alternatives to the mainstream, as there are often undiscovered advantages. Companies like AMD offer support and attention other companies may find unnecessary."

Tippett's render farm runs on Linux, and Rice wanted to assess how well the actual hardware would be supported at the chip level using Linux. "We built some prototype desktop workstations powered by AMD Athlon MP processors," said Rice. "We had tried systems powered by a competitor's processors, and they worked fairly well. However, we absolutely preferred the performance of the AMD Athlon™ processor. A good part of the advantage comes from the performance of AMD's floating point engine, which is very important to compute-intensive operations such as rendering."

Rice was equally impressed with the qualifications Appro brought to the table, including experience, attitude and a willingness to listen. When the systems arrived, Rice felt even better about his decision.

"Our first purchase from Appro arrived completely functional. Twenty-five of twenty-five servers sprang to life from the start. That may seem to be an obvious expectation, but, in reality, I've never before found that to be the case. They were everything I could have wanted in a 1U server and more. We now have fantastic, stable units."

Given the demands of the major film production companies, studios like Tippett rely on around-the-clock results.

"In visual effects, the artist may have something grand in mind, but time forces compromises. The fact is we render 24 hours a day," said Rice. "With our new systems, a lot of work gets done overnight, whereas before we'd come in to work and find hundreds or thousands of frames still in the queue. We have greatly reduced the need to selectively cancel tasks each morning. Better performance allows for more iterations and thus a better product."

Rice has exceeded his goal of boosting the power of the studio's render farm. "Using the AMD Athlon MP processor-based systems, we have surpassed our goal of doubling the work done per hour in terms of frames rendered, in comparison to the older equipment," said Rice. "Plus we now have 50 machines in two racks instead of the five racks we had before," Rice added, referring to the 1.75 inch height of each 1U unit. "That gives us more than double the performance in less than half the space. Now we can keep growing without needing a larger area."

The price/performance advantage Tippett Studio enjoys through its use of Appro and AMD products has fundamentally changed the way Rice views expansion of his resources.

"The economics of growing our render farm are no longer a once-every-few-years topic. We can add machines anytime we want, with very short turnarounds. Previously, it would take months to get new machines, but now it's more like a couple of weeks with Appro. And reliability is great. These systems have been running superbly since May. Perhaps (utility provider) Pacific Gas & Electric could bring them down, but not much else."

Better hardware doesn't end the challenges facing Tippett artists, but it does refine their focus. "More is expected because more is possible," said Rice. " It used to be that a particular effect was computationally impossible within the constraints of time. That's getting harder to say because of the prowess and innovation of these new tools. Technology in our industry is not the key differentiator -it will always be the artist. However, the technology makes a big difference. It allows us to spend less time on the trivial and more time on complex projects.

"The bottom line," Rice concluded, "is that, with these AMD Athlon MP processor-based Appro systems, we have exceeded our goal of increasing our rendering power, and done so at considerable cost savings in comparison to our previous systems."

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