MUMBAI: Crest Animation Studios has associated with Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) for rendering Alpha and Omega, India‘s first 3D stereoscopic animation feature developed by it.

The film Alpha and Omega that released on 17 September was completed in a record time using Eka supercomputer at CRL, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tata Sons.

This is the first time an Indian studio has taken on the top global animation studios on their own turf by releasing the movie in screens across US and Europe.
The film also marks yet another milestone in the Indian animation industry. Combining its own infrastructure, Crest used the high-performance computing infrastructure at CRL to accelerate its rendering schedule by about five months. 

CRL‘s supercomputer Eka, which was used in this project, is one of the world‘s fastest and most versatile supercomputers. It can perform more than 133 trillion sustained calculations per second.

The super computer made it possible for Crest to reduce its rendering times per frame by about 50 per cent and increase throughput by approximately 500 per cent without proportional cost implications.

Says Crest Animation Studios CEO A K Madhavan, "Rendering of animation movie is a very compute intensive process. It also tends to be very time consuming and costly. With our own infrastructure, it looked tough to manage our release schedule for September 2010. CRL‘s strong expertise in delivering on-demand high performance computing (HPC) and their dedicated support services proved to be a cost-effective alternative."

CRL Chairman S Ramadorai avers, "CRL‘s High Performance Cloud provides one of the fastest rendering infrastructures available globally. CRL has been able to quickly ramp up and down the infrastructure to best suit a customer‘s immediate needs.

Soon, several Hollywood flicks would be powered by an Indian - for the first time, a machine - supercomputer Eka. CRL is already talking to studios in Europe and US regarding its supercomputer