o convert the mind-blowing dreams of the creative 3-D animation artists to reality, it usually requires advanced 3-D computer graphics technology as well as sufficient startup funds. For overcoming these obstacles in the creativity process, the NARL’s National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) has built a "Render Farm" platform, one of the Formosa supercomputer series, to provide cloud-ba

The Render Farm adopts Linux operating system and integrates massive amount of storage space, high-speed transmission bandwidth, high-performance scientific simulation technology via graphics processing unit cluster, and render queuing system. Henceforth the content creators can upload massive rendering jobs to the Render Farm via broadband internet connections, and monitor the computing status through a graphical user interface, whether Linux, Windows, or Mac OS is used.

Then the abundant computational capability of the Formosa series supercomputers helps to generate unparalleled image quality of different human ex

Take a 3-minute short animation film for example, it needs about 6 million TWD (200,000 USD) to establish a render workstation and one month of round-the-clock calculation to complete the rendering process. Nonetheless by networking over an internet connection to the NARL-NCHC’s Render Farm, it needs approximately only one week of computation time.

Recently, the Render Farm with its improved computation capacity and storage size has facilitated the production of animated films entitled Ripples of Desire by The 3rd Vision Films Ltd., Tai-Chi Star Cat by StarQ and KENTADIP, and Hatching by TWR Entertainment, Inc. The latter was featured at SIGGRAPH 2012 computer animation exhibition on 7-9 August in Los Angles, USA.

The Render Farm has overcome a series of challenging technological bottlenecks in animation, and become a valuable touchstone to foster creativity and encourage the creators and the artists. Meanwhile, the NARL-NCHC is continuing to work on an improved version of it. On the other hand, in order to speed up the soft power development of Taiwan's 3-D film and animation market, it requires many sharp eyes, creative minds and dexterous hands from different culture, art and technology sectors.

Climbing to the top in the fast-changing world of 3-D animation market is not easy, but by working together with experts from engineering, animation physics, information technology, etc. for the development of key technologies, creative animation artists and producers are bound to produce quality products with premium content.