[October 01, 2014]

RVX Delivers Carbon Neutral Visual Effects, Taking the Film Industry Green with Verne Global

Verne Global, an innovative, UK-based developer of energy efficient data center campuses, today announced that RVX is creating its world-class, visual effects for some of Hollywood's highest profile film projects - including Everest, set to be released in 2015- with a high-performance computing (HPC) application hosted at Verne Global's data center campus in Iceland. The skill and talent of RVX's studio team, in combination with the low-cost, 100% green-powered, HPC infrastructure delivered by Verne Global, enables RVX to meet the technical and power requirements that visual effects rendering demands.

RVX, renowned for its work on such films as Two Guns, Contraband and as part of the Oscar-winning visual effects team on the film Gravity, recognizes firsthand the need for HPC within the movie industry. HPC provides the super-computing horsepower needed to render today's effect-laden films. The process is highly computer intensive, especially for the complex data sets that originate from high-resolution images, animation and virtual reality. In order to deliver the artistic and creative vision RVX has for its film projects, the studio knew it needed a solution based on a reliable nd highly-available power grid in a data center environment that would let them scale as projects demanded.

"We are always being asked to push the envelope to create more visually stunning, hyper-realistic special effects in the projects we develop. The graphics requirement of each film is ten times more complex than the film before it," said Dadi Einarsson, co-founder and creative director for RVX. "The last thing we want is for the skill and talent of our artists to be constrained by the technical infrastructure and computing power needed to create those graphics. With Verne Global we now have access to a scalable, high performance computing platform that allows us to push our creative boundaries to almost limitless levels."

The film and digital media industries are increasingly relying on data centers for their post-production needs, and when powered by traditional fossil fuels, can account for almost half the entire carbon footprint of film post-production. With a far lower carbon footprint than the popular film industry hubs of London, New York, Amsterdam and Paris (based on 10 year CO2 per 1MW IT load), Iceland is increasingly becoming a destination for studios looking to reduce their impact on the environment, as well as reduce their CGI (News - Alert) rendering production costs. By hosting their render farm on Verne Global's data center campus, RVX can not only take advantage of 100% renewable, long-term, low-cost power, but can also scale the number of HPC cores needed for each project within the data center. This allows RVX to quickly deploy their digital applications and render more complex film visual effects faster, all while keeping their data center footprint and energy costs to a minimum.

"The film and digital media industry, like other compute intensive sectors, relies heavily on the power and infrastructure a data center provides. For the film industry, in particular, data centers are critical to delivering the complex data sets created by the studio and production teams," said Jeff Monroe, CEO of Verne Global. "By hosting their HPC render farm at Verne Global's campus, RVX now has maximum flexibility in their business operations and can focus solely on creating stunning visual effects for some of Hollywood's biggest movies."

About Verne Global

Verne Global is an innovative developer of energy efficient data center campuses, including the industry's first 100% dual sourced, renewably powered data center in Keflavik, Iceland. Discover how companies like BMW Group, RMS and CCP Games are going green with their data at www.verneglobal.com.

About RVX

RVX is a world class visual effects and animation studio based in Reykjavik's harbour district, fast becoming a creative hub for film and games production. Formerly Framestore Reykjavik, RVX opened in 2008 and have since provided visual effects for numerous films including Contraband, The Deep and 2 Guns. RVX has also contributed to Hollywood blockbuster films Australia, Sherlock Holmes, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and Gravity.

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