November 7, 2007

Purdue wants to show benefits of working together in creating animated graphics at conference

Envision Center representatives will conduct demonstrations at the SC07 international conference for high-performance computing, networking, storage and analysis set for Nov. 10-16 in Reno, Nev. The conference attracts professionals from universities, research laboratories and computer corporations such as IBM and Intel.

Purdue's team will showcase TeraDRE, free software that that can be downloaded and used to create computer animations. Users also can download the source code and use it to create their own rendering clusters in addition to using Purdue's.

TeraDRE stands for TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment. By using distributed rendering, academic animators and researchers doing scientific visualizations can have several computers working at once to create 3-D animations in a fraction of the time it would take a single computer.

"Think of an animated movie like 'Shrek,'" said Laura Arns, a research scientist and associate director for the Envision Center. "For the average animated movie they show you 30 pictures per second. That's how fast film plays, and that's a lot of pictures they have to draw for a two-hour movie. The idea of TeraDRE is, instead of doing it all on one computer, you distribute the drawing among computers so it can save a lot of time."

TeraDRE, which was developed at Purdue in 2006, runs off the Purdue Condor computer grid. Condor sends animations across the grid for rendering, and TeraDRE takes those frames and reassembles them in the proper order. Information about TeraDRE and how to download it is available at https://teradre.rcac.purdue.edu

The software also has wide potential in the academic setting.

"A biologist might send animations of virus cells to render, or we will show a big movie of HIV as it travels through the body," Arns said.

"We want other people to use this software and to share this resource. If we could get other universities to share with us and we can share with them, that will help all of us."

Purdue representatives first showcased its use of TeraDRE as a pilot version at the July 2006 SIGGRAPH Conference. Arns said they were able to take several animations that would have taken 142 days of rendering time running on a single machine and complete them during the six days of the conference.

Writer: Jim Bush, (765) 494-2077, jsbush@purdue.edu

Source: Laura Arns: (765) 494-6432, arns@purdue.edu

Purdue News Service: (765) 494-2096; purduenews@purdue.edu

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