English: The need for compute horsepower drove John McNeil Studio co-director Brandon Kuchta to try Amazon’s EC2, or Elastic Compute Cloud. The elastic nature of Amazon’s service allowed the McNeil team to instantly dial up or down the amount processing power and storage space required for each phase of the process. After setting up a master computer with Amazon, Kutchta was able to access the processing power of hundreds of computers. They were able to simultaneously render several phases of the animation project.

“With Amazon, it’s pay as you go, so we can fire up 300 machines at once,” said Kuchta. “If we needed them just for a few hours, that’s all we would pay for and then we spin them down until we needed them again.”

Intel Free Press story: Cloud Computing Democratizes Digital Animation. Pay-as-you-go datacenter processing power creates opportunity for smaller business.