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DreamWorks “Turbo” Accelerated by HP: The Technology Behind the 2013 Film

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DreamWorks Animation used an end-to-end HP production environment for Turbo, from artist workstations and studio networking to render servers, storage, displays and print services. In a July 2013 announcement, HP and DreamWorks reported 75 million render hours, an average of 500,000 rendering jobs per day, 32 Indy 500 race cars and 32 million crowd-character instances. Those performance figures were supplied by HP and reported at the time; they are not independent benchmark results.

What Turbo is

Turbo is a PG-rated animated comedy directed by David Soren. The 20th Century Studios film page lists a July 17, 2013 release and a runtime of 1 hour 35 minutes. Universal Pictures Home Entertainment lists the title at 1 hour 36 minutes, so official pages differ by one minute. The film follows a speed-obsessed garden snail who enters the Indianapolis 500.

How HP supported the production

The announcement described a broad production stack rather than one “Turbo” computer. Different HP systems handled artist interaction, communication, rendering, data protection and physical output.

Production role HP technology described in the 2013 announcement How it fit the pipeline
Artist workstations HP Z800 and Z820 workstations with Intel Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 processors Provided local compute for modeling, animation, lighting and other interactive tasks. The report said workstation iterations ran 50% faster than on previous workstations.
Remote work and networking HP Remote Graphics Software and HP FlexNetwork Supported access and collaboration among DreamWorks locations in Glendale, Redwood City and Bangalore.
Cloud and render capacity HP Enterprise Cloud Services and ProLiant Gen8 servers Supplied scalable compute for the render farm and production services.
Primary storage HP 3PAR StoreServ Held production data and supported the tools used during the filmmaking process.
Archive storage HP StoreAll 9730 Handled longer-term archiving of the project’s files.
Data-center infrastructure HP BladeSystem c7000 Packaged server and infrastructure resources in the studio’s data-center environment.
Color and review HP DreamColor displays Gave artists and reviewers a display platform for evaluating digital imagery.
Office output HP Managed Print Services Supported the studio’s printing workflow alongside the digital pipeline.

What the reported production numbers mean

75 million render hours

Computer Graphics World’s July 24, 2013 report on the announcement attributed 75 million render hours to the film’s production. A render hour is one hour of computation by one rendering unit; it is not the film’s running time or the elapsed calendar time of production. The figure indicates the cumulative scale of the render workload.

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500,000 rendering jobs per day

HP reported that the studio rendered an average of 500,000 jobs daily. “Jobs” can range from individual frames or test renders to larger tasks, so this number should not be read as 500,000 completed shots each day.

32 race cars and 32 million crowd instances

The announcement cited 32 Indy 500 race cars and 32 million crowd-character instances. These figures describe scene complexity: the cars required detailed vehicle assets, while crowd instances allowed the production to populate race environments without authoring every spectator as a unique character.

230 terabytes of files

The same report cited 230 terabytes of files, underscoring why high-capacity primary storage and a separate archive system were part of the production design.

HP’s claimed performance gains

As reproduced in the 2013 report and HP announcement, ProLiant Gen8 servers delivered approximately 40% greater render throughput and approximately 42% higher performance per watt. These are HP’s reported comparisons for the production environment, not independently verified measurements. The announcement also said the workstation generation was 50% faster than DreamWorks’ previous workstations, another historical production claim attributed to that announcement.

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Why the studio framed the technology as an alliance

The technology was presented as an integrated operating environment: fast artist workstations were connected through the network to shared services, render capacity, storage and archival systems. That arrangement mattered for a film that moved large assets among artists and locations while repeatedly rendering complex race scenes.

“DreamWorks Animation’s strategic alliance with HP ensured that we had the high-performance computing, continuous availability and streamlined management capabilities needed to accurately depict Turbo’s dream of becoming the world’s fastest racer.”

— Derek Chan, then DreamWorks Animation’s head of Technology Global Operations, quoted in Computer Graphics World’s 2013 report

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What “accelerated by HP” does—and does not—mean

The phrase describes infrastructure support, not an HP-authored animation system or a claim that a single server made the movie faster. HP supplied components across the pipeline, while DreamWorks artists and production teams created the characters, environments, animation and final imagery. The reported percentages and totals belong to the 2013 announcement and should be understood in that historical context; they do not establish how equivalent modern hardware would perform.

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Where to watch or collect Turbo

Universal Pictures Home Entertainment lists Turbo in digital, Blu-ray and DVD formats. Availability can vary by retailer and region, but a Turbo DVD or Turbo Blu-ray is the relevant physical-product option for viewers who want a copy of the film rather than historical HP production hardware.

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