Supercomputing power enriches visual experience in Chinese cinema

GUIYANG -- A bullet whizzes out from the screen, a figure plummets from a great height at breakneck speed... During the Spring Festival holiday, realistic special effects in movies left the audiences lasting impressions, with box office revenue in China reaching a record of 9.51 billion yuan (approximately $1.33 billion) between Jan 28 and Feb 4.

In the animated feature blockbuster "Ne Zha 2," for example, the number of special effect shots has surpassed the total number of shots in its predecessor, helping make it the highest-grossing film of all time in China.

Behind the thrilling visual effects are the post-production services based on supercomputing power, which offers high-performance computing support for fields such as film rendering.

Movies are usually shot using cameras, but some scenes, such as dangerous fight sequences or fantastical elements that do not exist in reality, cannot be captured in real life and must be created on computers.

Peng Benqian, a manager of the Gui'an New Area Science and Technology Innovation Industry Development Co., Ltd., a high-tech business in Southwest China's Guizhou province that runs the Gui'an Supercomputing Center, said the company has provided post-rendering services for over 100 films and TV productions, including "Ne Zha 2."

Post-rendering enhances visual realism, impact and dynamism using techniques such as color correction, compositing, animation, blending and segmentation. These processes transform ordinary scenes into vibrant and engaging content, boosting a film's visual appeal.

"The data volume for a 3D animated film can exceed 250 terabytes. It would take 600 years to complete if rendered on a single server. But with thousands of servers working simultaneously, it can be done in just a few months," Peng said.

The Gui'an Supercomputing Center in the provincial capital Guiyang began operations in late 2020. With 1,000 high-performance graphics processors and over 700 servers, it boasts a combined computing power of 15 quadrillion calculations per second now, a speed unattainable by ordinary personal computers.

Since January 2021, when a company specializing in visual cloud computing services in China's southern city of Shenzhen purchased computing power from the center, digital content production has become one of its most in-demand services.

The center's average server utilization rate has exceeded 80 percent, according to Peng.

To date, the Guiyang Big Data Sci-tech Innovation City, an industrial park where the supercomputing center is located, has attracted 1,355 enterprises, 60 percent of which are big data companies.

Film rendering is a typical application scenario of China's "east data, west computing" project.

Initiated in 2022, the project to enhance data storage and processing capacity of the country's western inland regions for data from economically advanced eastern regions has spurred the full-scale construction of eight national computing hubs, including Guizhou.

Often dubbed China's big data hub, the mountainous province of Guizhou is the country's first national big data comprehensive pilot zone. It promotes the big data industry as the backbone of its high-quality development.

"As a less developed region in western China, we have been striving to catch up, and the digital economy is our new frontier," said Zhang Yu, director of the industrial park.