Grid Computing News : Grid Goes to the Movies

Sun Microsystems' (Nasdaq: JAVA) Network.com grid computing service played a key role in a new open source animated film. The 3D animation film "Big Buck Bunny" was rendered using the Sun Grid compute utility service, and the movie was created using the open source 3D software suite Blender, available from blender.org and the Network.com Application Catalog, a collection of on-demand grid-enabled applications. Network.com is also one of the hosting locations for the online release, which can be downloaded here . Ton Roosendaal, producer and Blender Institute director, said the point of the movie "was to stimulate the development of open source 3D software, but the quality of Big Buck Bunny on an artistic level as well as on technical ingenuity is what you would expect from large animation studios." The movie promotes open content creation by the use of open source software, and it is also distributed under an open license that gives artists free access to the entire studio database of assets and files used to make the movie. "Even though the Blender team did not have the support of a big studio, they succeeded with the community support, an open source rendering software and an on-demand computing platform," stated David Folk, group manager of Network.com marketing.... read more