Product: PipelineFX, University of Hawaii Deploy Render Farm

PipelineFX has announced a partnership with the University of Hawaii to deploy an animation render farm in support of digital media education programs across the island. Housed at a Leeward Community College (LCC) data center, the new animation render farm is comprised of over 50 computers providing rendering power for Autodesk Maya 3D animations and AfterEffects composites. When not in use by students, desktop machines are managed as rendering machines by PipelineFX's Qube!, the company’s flagship render farm management software for film production and game development. According to PipelineFX, the render farm allows processes that would normally take an individual computer 24 hours to process to now be accomplished in less than one hour, freeing up existing classroom computers so that they may be used by students. The project in being led by the University of Hawaii Academy for Creative Media (ACM) founder and chairman Chris Lee, who most recently was the executive producer on Warner Brothers’ summer film 'Superman Returns'. Lee is also a producer on the upcoming film 'One Foot to Heaven'. In addition, the ACM and Waianae High School use the system remotely over the University’s wide-area network. Qube! provides a simple interface for the students to submit their jobs from anywhere on the network for processing on the powerful network, centralized system. The results are then transferred back over the inter-campus automatically. “PipelineFX is thrilled to support such a leading-edge deployment of digital media resources for education programs in our home state,” said PipelineFX CEO Troy Brooks. “Rendering really is the bottleneck for many animation and graphics programs. This state-of-the-art render farm with seamless remote connectivity provides the number crunching power to increase the complexity and detail of local students’ work to a professional level.”