70-teraflop supercomputer to boost animation output in Taiwan

A new Taiwan-developed supercomputer is being eyed to help speed up the production of animation and special effects.

 

The machine is being developed by the National Center for High-performance Computing (NCHC), according to a report on Taiwan's Central News Agency.

 

CNA quoted Alpha Wang, manager of the planning and promotion division at the NCHC, as saying the supercomputer dubbed "Formosa 4" is Taiwan's largest self-built cloud-computing system.

 

Wang said the system uses a graphic processing unit (GPU) cluster and is located at the Tainan branch of the NCHC.

 

She said the machine is expected to come online in mid-June.

 

"Usually it takes about one year to finish the computation of some complicated animations and special effects ... Formosa 4 will be able to shorten the time and help companies introduce their works earlier," she said.

 

Formosa 4 costs NT$37 million (US$1.25 million), and uses a hybrid computing framework combining a central processing unit (CPU) and GPU to further reduce construction costs and increase energy efficiency. 

 

It has an optimal performance of 70 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second), nearly nine times faster than the 8 teraflops of Formosa 3, which was launched in August 2011.

 

The CNA said Formosa 4 was ranked 234th on the 38th TOP500 supercomputer list released in the SC11 Conference in Seattle in November 2011.

 

Render farm

 

The CNA report said the Formosa series has established a "Render Farm" platform to provide cloud-based animation and special effect rendering services for local film and animation industries.

 

Launched in November 2011, the Render Farm has also integrated a dynamic simulation system and animation software to cultivate rendering techniques for special effects.

 

"Some companies are using the previous generation cluster computer, Formosa 3, to compute their animations," Wang said. — TJD, GMA News