Hollywood studios like DreamWorks have become coveted customers for HP and its rivals as the shift to digital animation demands sophisticated computing know-how.

Thanks in part to a collaboration with HP, the animation division of DreamWorks SKG is having a good year. It has launched two major movies in one year. Shrek 2 has grossed a gargantuan $436 million in North America, and Shark Tale has generated $118 million in just three weeks. Those hits helped power DreamWorks Animation's successful initial public stock offering last week. The Glendale, Calif., company raised $660 million, giving it an initial valuation of about $3 billion.

One engine behind this bonanza is DreamWorks' use of a novel technology concept in which the company rents computing power from Palo Alto, Calif.-based HP. The two companies worked together on the original Shrek movie in 2001, and they expanded their partnership in the making of Shrek 2.

When crunch time came with the production of Shrek 2, DreamWorks' PDI/DreamWorks division in Redwood City, Calif., tapped all of the 1,000 computers on its campus.

But that wasn't enough. So it plugged into HP's "utility rendering service,'' effectively borrowing another 500 powerful computer servers at HP. In rendering, a computer takes software instructions from a programmer and creates an image out of millions of digital dots known as pixels. All told, DreamWorks used 10 million compute hours to complete the movie — more than three times the computing power it used in the first Shrek.

That's why every blade of grass in the movie looks realistic. When DreamWorks was done with the computers, HP made them available to other customers who needed to rent computing time.

Those processors came in handy at the end of the production, said Ken Bielenberg, visual effects supervisor on Shrek 2. The utility rendering service lets us more dynamically increase and decrease the technology on each show.