Inside DreamWorks Animation Studios: A Look at Past, Present, and Future Challenges

This talk will share some insights into the DreamWorks Animation Studios, starting with a short history. We'll explore the challenges of balancing custom work-flow expectations, HPC compute requirements, the "10 billion files" dilemma, and bending the rules of physics and latency, all without losing our artistic roots. We'll explain what we've done to make technology—advanced and traditional—invisible in a workplace filled with scientists whose right brains are bigger than their left, and what it's like to run over 2,000 Linux desktops being used by artists on a full-time basis. We will engage the audience in a debate on the merits of globalized computing, very high density computing, and storage clusters, suggesting new ideas about how to overcome these barriers.