Students at Ringling College of Art and Design, in Sarasota, Fla., take their art very seriously. As well they should, given that many have gone on to win Student Academy Awards for their computer animation skills. 

John Ringling, who was a fine-art collector; real estate developer; and a founder, with his brother, of the Ringling circus, founded the school in 1931. However, there are no signs here of anything having to do with a circus. Consider this: The college’s computer animation program is ranked No. 1 in North America and No. 4 in the world by 3D World magazine.

The 1,200 student artists take their art seriously. The college is indisputably one of the preeminent art and design colleges, with bachelor’s degrees in about 15 majors, and fertile ground for recruiters from
Disney, Lucas Arts Entertainment, Pixar, DreamWorks, and other top studios—even the CIA. 

State-of-the-art tools

The information technology infrastructure at Ringling College consists of enterprise-class technology resources including ultra-high-performance central storage, a high-bandwidth data network supporting 10-gigabit Ethernet technologies, AMD Opteron™ processor-based HP xw9400 workstations and applications for creating 3-D models. Computer animation majors, for example, use state-of-the-art workstations. Without enough processing power, even a
computer-animated short can take hours to render, and seniors are itching to complete their three-minute projects, graduate and move on to their careers. 

“The students do not rely on hardware for their creative ability, but it lets them be more creative and pursue new directions,” says Jim McCampbell, head of the computer animation department, which has 360 students split between two majors: computer animation, and game art and design. 

“The faster and more capable the hardware is, the more creative latitude the artist has,” says McCampbell, who understands a bit about hardware but, like his students, is an artist and not a techie. “If it’s faster, I can try a lot more creative ideas in a shorter span of time and therefore make a more creative product.” 

Enter Mahmoud Pegah, Ph.D., director of institutional technology. With a doctorate in computer science from Michigan State University, Pegah spent several years as a professor at the University of Northern Iowa before joining Ringling. When he arrived 11 years ago, the campus had a mere 40 gigabytes of digital information. “At the time, I did not understand why they needed a Ph.D. in computer science to run this,” he recalls. 

Today he understands: With more than 300 terabytes of ultra-high-performance central storage (some senior animation projects alone contain 30 GB), the design and artwork environment demands storage capacity, advanced graphics applications and the power to render individual frames into animation. “All of those require a high-performance information technology infrastructure,” Pegah says. 

The instructional computing laboratories were still using UNIX workstations when he arrived. A few years later, Pegah decided Hewlett-Packard (HP) workstations with the x86 architecture were up to the task. One of the first things McCampbell looks for when Pegah asks him to test a new workstation is the contrast ratio in the screen technology; HP has delivered consistently in this regard. After that, Pegah says, the decision mostly comes down to processing power.

Even a one-minute animation can have thousands of frames to render. “Rendering in computer animation is a process in which a series of 3-D geometric models is converted into graphic images to generate an illusion of continuous motion,” Pegah says. “Rendering of an animated scene is a compute-intensive application and requires clusters of high-performance networked computers.”

Memory access is king

Today, Ringling uses HP workstations with 64-bit AMD Opteron processors for its computer animation instructional computing laboratories. “Our apps require a lot of memory. The AMD Opteron processor is a revolutionary processor that contains a separate path to memory banks,” Pegah says. He uses a traffic analogy to explain this advantage: Thousands of people driving to different destinations using the same highway can expect traffic jams. If each destination has a separate road leading to it, then traffic moves along with no snarls. 

AMD calls it AMD64 technology with Direct Connect Architecture. It improves overall system performance and efficiency by eliminating traditional bottlenecks inherent in legacy architectures. Legacy front-side buses restrict and interrupt the flow of data. Slower data flow means sluggish system performance. Interrupted data flow means reduced system output. With AMD’s Direct Connect Architecture, there are no front-side-bus bottlenecks. Instead, the processors, memory controller and I/O are directly connected to the central processing unit (CPU) and communicate over separate and dedicated high-speed paths. 

At Ringling, students use a high-end 3-D computer graphics and 3-D modeling software package such as Maya from AutoDesk, Inc., San Rafael, Calif., or CryEngine2, the engine behind the newly released game Crysis, from Crytek GmbH, a Frankfurt, Germany-based video game development company.

The AMD Opteron processor’s low power consumption was another factor. “Rendering frames on an AMD Opteron processor-based platform is energy-efficient and ultimately can help us save money,” Pegah says. “We are also delighted to contribute to our campus green computing initiatives without sacrificing performance.”

The workstations in McCampbell’s computer animation lab are the most advanced on campus—more than 150 of the HP xw9400s powered by Dual-Core
AMD Opteron Model 2218 processors. Students in other majors—including illustration, graphic and interactive communication, and photography and digital imaging—also have computing needs but don’t require the HP xw9400 platform. To keep the technology current and to provide Ringling students with the latest technology on the market, Ringling College has opted to use a technology refresh model that incorporates workstation refresh in discipline-specific academic computer laboratories every other year.

demands keep increasing 

Pegah upgrades computer animation workstations every other year, moves the older generation into lower-end computer laboratories and reassigns workstations from lower-end computer labs to administrative tasks. He gets about six years from each machine.

In the background, invisible to users, is a rendering farm with about 350 nodes, a portion of which is driven by AMD Opteron processors. “When the workstations are not in use in computer laboratories, we harness unused computing power in addition to our dedicated render farm to address the computing requirements of our students’ and faculty’s rendering projects,” Pegah says. 

Pegah first acquired an HP xw9300 with Single-Core AMD Opteron Model 250 processors in 2005. He began to upgrade to the HP xw9400 with Dual-Core AMD Opteron Model 2218 processors in the summer of 2007. Service and support from HP and AMD have been superb, he says.

Like other users of high-end computers, Ringling animation students can never get enough power. “These workstations have been wonderful,” McCampbell says. “But the more that becomes possible, the more we ask.” 

With Dual-Core AMD Opteron Model 2218 processors, students can add complexity to each frame that would have been impossible with older processors. For example, global illumination, which gives 3-D graphics the most lifelike look, was not fully possible until the current generation of workstations, McCampbell says. “Effects such as smoke, fire and fog can be calculated much faster now, too.”

And in the world of computer animation, speed is a ruling factor.