Disney rendered its new animated film on a 55,000-core supercomputer
Really 55,000 cores isn't all that "big", its 2300 Dual CPU Ivybridge class servers from Supermicro, which will set you back about $10M if you load them up with RAM (which I would do with this workload). Why not go a bit higher and get 25,000 machines and stick a couple of GPUs in each of them. Figure the movie is rendered at 8K resolution, 60 frames per second (for 30 frames per second 3D stereo), if you render left and right view frames on a machine in say 5 minutes, that renders an entire 2 hour movie overnight. Sure setting the lights and setting the motion takes most of the time but we've reached a point where a "big budget" animated movie can afford the hardware. Even more so if it is done on a rental type deal.Take the infrastructure of an Amazon or a Google and its not really a material chunk of their resources. In fact, Amazon could no doubt offer an 'Elastic Render' service ala EC2 and really help a lot of CGI companies become profitable. The thing that kills those companies is keeping all the hardware after they don't need it any more. If you don't store it properly it becomes worthless, if you store it too long it becomes worthless, if you leave powered up and running it sucks money out of your account long after the checks from the projects come in.