DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc. has boosted the companies 4000 processor Linux based render farm with some new software from Ibrix Inc. according to ComputerWorld.

Ed Leonard, DreamWorks chief technology officer, said the Ibrix Fusion software has boosted I/O speeds to shorten concurrent information access by artists…

Leonard said DreamWorks added Ibrix to its animation system about six months ago to create an interactive lighting prototype for digital artists working on lighting for Kung Fu Panda. The company was seeking to stop system I/O from being brought “to its knees” by animators simultaneously pinging the compute cluster overnight to retrieve digital frame data.
“We needed super performance [for our] file storage and access so when 2,000 computers start asking for the same texture file for one of the [film's] characters, our system isn’t overweighed by I/O,” said Leonard. Scenes that once took two hours to create, he said, are now completed in seconds. “That’s pretty remarkable, and we’re scratching the surface on where we are going with this.”