IBM and Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) have announced the development of Malaysia's most advanced cloud computing animation center, bolstering the country's fledging creative content industry.

Addressing the rapid increase in creative content companies, both within and outside of MDeC and the increased demand for rendering services, MDeC's animation cloud will provide centralized facilities and programs to help Malaysian animators, visual effects artists and multimedia students to bring their ideas to fruition in the digital content space.

The new high performance cloud center supports multiple concurrent users, and is accessible via the Internet for job submissions, monitoring and management. With real-time testing, the facility is able to perform rendering jobs – a critical part of creative content production and animation--up to eight times faster compared to rendering on a local workstation. The facility frees creative content companies from the burden of having to outlay a lot of money to install their own rendering systems or pay hefty sums to private service providers.

The high performance cloud rendering facility includes IBM's hardware, software, and cloud computing and consulting services. The center will facilitate the creation of creative content by local creative content companies and enhance the work of creative companies by reducing the rendering in-house production time and to produce high quality images for computer-generated content.

The MAC3 Rendering Farm is part of the MSC Malaysia Animation and Creative Content Centre or MAC3, a strategic division established by MDeC with a mandate to drive the development of the nation's digital creative industry.

"It is a well-known fact that rendering is expensive and the MAC3 high performance rendering facility will help local creative content companies, especially the start-ups, to overcome the cost barrier," said Deputy Prime Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin. "With this facility in place, Malaysia's creative content companies will have the technological edge in their rendering and production processes. At the same time, it will also help them lower their costs," he said. Construction of the MAC3 Cloud Rendering Farm was completed in April 2010.