Dean Takahashi, VentureBeat, writes about the making of Pixar’s Monsters University. Most impressive is the computing power required to render the film - 24,000 cores and 29 hours for a single frame:
Rendering means that the computers build the 3D world in its full colors as the scene is meant to be viewed in a theater. The machines create the frame and it is then captured as one of thousands of frames in the movie. When you watch the movie, you see anywhere from 24 frames to 60 frames per second.
All told, it has taken more than 100 million CPU hours to render the film in its final form. If you used one CPU to do the job, it would have taken about 10,000 years to finish. With all of those CPUs that Pixar did have, it took a couple of years to render.
(via: Stephen Hackett)