"Following the successful launch of bullx, Bull Group has once again proved, through this collaboration, that it is at the very heart of the digital economy", commented Didier Lamouche, Chairman and CEO of Bull.

"We were impressed by Bull's remarkable ability to design and configure solutions in extremely critical situations, involving a multitude of systems and, above all, very strict deadlines", explained Gonzalo Rueda, IT Director at Ilion.

The Planet 51 project was born in 2002. Since then, Ilion Animation Studios has created an entire parallel universe around Planet 51 using leading-edge technologies. The result is an incredible visual experience which cannot be compared with any other animated film. Over 350 people from more than 20 countries worldwide have worked on Planet 51 - including designers, developers, engineers and many other professionals - with a budget of some $70 million.

Designing a 3D animated movie is one of the most compute-intensive tasks in terms of computing power and hardware resources. Creating a frame not only requires high levels of creativity from the animation designers but also many complex algorithms to render textures, shadows, volumes, shiny effects and other characteristics that come to together to give a genuine sense of realism.

Each frame which makes up the movie involves a graphics generation process that is managed by intensive computing machines. Depending on the image resolution being used and the complexity of the scene, this process can take from a few minutes to over three hours, and the only way to speed it up is to call on more computing power.

Ilion Animation Studios has had its own server farm based on a version of Microsoft Windows designed for High-Performance Computing (HPC) for a number of years now, and this platform has been used since 2002 to render the graphics for Planet 51.