Among the largest family entertainment brands in the world, DreamWorks Animation, LLC has created some of today’s most popular movies, from Kung-Fu Panda to Shrek. Known for its state-of-the-art innovation in 3D animated feature films, the company relies on HPE technology to help it create and produce films with billions of files and millions of hours of compute time.

To get some insight into how DreamWorks Animation uses this technology, Dave Vellante (@dvellante), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke to our Woman In Tech featured guest this week — Kate Swanborg, head of Technology, Communication & Alliances  — during HPE Discover 2016 in Las Vegas. Swanborg sat down with Vellante and Tim Peters, VP and GM of Core Enterprise Servers, Software and Solutions at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. (HPE), to discuss what it takes to manage tens of millions of compute hours and half a billion digital files for a single DreamWorks movie.

The technology demands of animation

In order to put technology’s contribution to animated movie-making into perspective, Swanborg detailed the amount of energy and types of technology needed to produce films at DreamWorks.

“One of the things people just don’t understand is just how much technology is required to make these films. These movies are 90 minutes long, and every single element in them has to be crafted, so it’s not like live action where you can take a camera out and film things. Everything in our movies has to be geometrically made and surfaced and textured and rendered, so by the time we’re done making one of our movies, we’ve usually created half a billion digital files.

“We’ve usually used 75 million compute hours just to render the images, and that’s just for one movie. We usually have 10 films in active production, so we are actively using 15,000 cores in a completely ProLiant blade server farm to make these movies every single day.”

A critical partnership

Peters explained how HPE is driven by a focus on innovation. He discussed the company’s role in instrumenting the world’s first persistent memory-enabled servers, which he feels is very important to the demands and workloads behind DreamWorks. Swanborg commented on the absolute necessity for this kind of technology for her company.

“What’s so critical for us, with these types of innovations, is that obviously our artist workflows are the most important thing. Our artists are sitting there; they have ideas. They want to make these characters, [and have them] perform in the way that audiences are going to love. What is important is [the] idea … and what they need to be able to do to realize it as quickly as possible.

“Things like persistent memory that’s going to give them the opportunity to keep that data, to keep those applications right there. It’s going to remove any latency. Suddenly, all of our in-house proprietary applications that we’ve completely architected to take advantage of scalable multi-core computing [puts] the compute on our side right now. And with this type of innovation, we’re going to have the memory on our side too. It’s a big deal for us.

“This is what is so important about the partnership we have with Hewlett-Packard. These types of integrated solutions that aren’t just thinking about one element, that are really thinking about the entire ecosystem. This makes a difference in the business that really can make an impact on the end user. That’s what can make an impact on our buying power and what we can really get for that investment — this is what Hewlett-Packard brings to the table, and no other company can as far as we’re concerned.”

Artists don’t want to wait

How does the HPE technology impact the end user at DreamWorks? Swanborg explained the importance of getting information quickly into the hands of the experts.

“Nobody wants to wait, especially if you’ve got an idea and you’ve got your director there standing over your shoulder, and you want to say, ‘Look at this.’ First of all, you want to look at it in the best possible way. You want it to be high-resolution; you want all of the characters; you want the entire environment. You don’t want to have to give up any of that stuff in order to get performance back. What these types of solutions offer is the whole enchilada. I get everything in my shot, I get it immediately, I get feedback from the director and I didn’t have to have anybody guessing about what was there, because everything can be produced on the fly in real-time.

“We’re actually directly enabling the producers on our films to make daily and hourly decisions on what they are going to prioritize within their movie-making in order to optimize their artists’ time and our digital resources. We’ve never had this kind of information before, and without a solution like Vertica and without a converged infrastructure with the ProLiant blades, we simply wouldn’t be able to do it. It’s too much data. And so that type of innovation is actually putting the power back where you want it, which is with the artist and with the producers on the film. You don’t have to have a middleman. It’s completely configured directly for what our business needs.”

To learn more about the technology HPE is developing and the requirements of a movie studio like DreamWorks Animation, watch the full video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of HPE Discover 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE