Project: PGPGrid (2003-2004)
Pepper’s Ghost Productions Grid
In the commercial world an increasing number of projects are being undertaken by consortia of companies that come together for the lifetime of a contract and then break up on successful completion of the work. This form of working is commonplace in, for instance, the construction and aerospace industries, but also in the media industries (film, television etc). Such examples of collaborative working are called Virtual Organisations (VOs) in the computer science and Grid communities.
In addition to providing seamless access to a pool of computing and data resources, the Grid has been widely identified as providing a core platform for the establishment of VOs for industry and commerce. The Pepper’s Ghost Production Grid (PGPGrid) project explored the use of the Grid for the production of Computer-Generated Animations. It brought together three complementary but very different organisations:
- Pepper’s Ghost Productions Ltd, a computer-generated animation company;
- 3D-Matic Lab at The University of Glasgow, part of the Imaging Faraday Partnership and expert in 3D processing technology;
- EPCC at The University of Edinburgh, Europe’s leading High Performance Computing centre.
Each of these partners took a specific role in the Virtual Organisation:
- Pepper’s Ghost Ltd provided the core animation requirement for the project, making use of the 3D-Matic Lab and EPCC resources to produce a short, computer-generated animation film.
- 3D-Matic Lab provided access to the 3D capture facility at The University of Glasgow to enable Pepper’s Ghost to produce the detailed animated models for subsequent rendering.
- EPCC provided the middleware and access to processing power for both the production of the animated models and the final rendered output.
The project achieved the following:
- Demonstrated that the Grid can allow computer-generated animation companies to take advantage of the ground-breaking, 3D image-capture technology;
- Demonstrated that the Grid can enable computer-generated animation companies to use on demand processing power available from the UK’s academic HPC facilities, under circumstances to do with the rendering technologies used;
- Undertook a study of best practice in the construction and management of VOs in a commercial Grid context.
More information is available from the www.pgpgrid.org.