For example, Mumble, the main character in the movie, had up to six million feathers.

"There were six shots in the movie that had more than 400,000 penguins in them," Desdoigts explained.

""This added up to over 17 million of CPU-hours used over the last nine months of Happy Feet production. "We were initially concerned about our ability to build and manage a processing capacity of that scale, but we achieved it thanks to the hardware, support and management technologies from IBM." Animal Logic and IBM built a rendering server farm using IBM BladeCenter chassis and BladeCenter HS20 blade servers, each with two Intel Xeon servers.

An initial implementation of 500 blade servers grew to 2,000, a total of 4,000 processors, for the last six months of the project.

Rendering was completed in October 2006 and the film was released in the United States the following month. "Our rendering capacity is the largest in Australia by far, and well within the top 100 in the world," Desdoigts said.