Jeffrey Jasper

Christopher: I think where I’d like to start specifically about the Jon Stewart project, but maybe, and this is your call, we can talk about it in a more general way. Ways of looking at producing an animation pipeline with really amazing turnaround times. First, the architecture of that, but then also the hardware piece because we focused first on the fastest workstation rendering solutions, then the fastest storage server solutions. As I recall, our NVMe Storage Server X10 for the week’s work, the Server Rack – X90-SE for archive using StableBit Drivepool. Creative was a 2D/3D hybrid, mixed reality and animation as well – can you just kind of talk about how that came to be, I think that would be a good place to start. Kind of bring us up to the present.

Jeffrey: Okay. I’ll cover pretty much what I’m allowed to talk about. Which is pretty much that I was approached a couple of years ago, saying that they were going to do a project with Jon Stewart and HBO. And it was going to be quick turnaround daily animation, so they’re going to release a funny animated short every day.

Pretty much everyone’s first reaction is that’s impossible or at least really complicated and expensive, if you want it to look good. They were wanting high quality animation and it was going to be streaming on HBO Now and Go, originally.

I was super excited by the challenge.

Jeffrey: In general, to go through the list. We had the quad GPU system i-X2, that’s the Xeons, which were geared towards the high quality rendering in both Octane and Redshift and those systems were phenomenally fast for rendering. We could distribute renders across them. Just because they were so quick, especially Octane, which scales across all four video cards linearly. It helped us limit the amount of cloud rendering we needed to do.

And then we wanted systems that could do lighter duty rendering service but be super fast generalist workstation so those were our lead animation workstations. So we went with the i-X Mediaworkstation with the dual 1080 cards, which I just love those systems. They were just a really nice, sweet spot for a workstation.

And then we had a general purpose workstation which was the i-X Mini with a single 1080 card. Which were still incredibly fast in a tiny form factor and they—for your Maya animator or someone working in something that doesn’t scale across multiple GPUs—like a game engine or something like iClone which is pretty much an animation software built on top of a game engine, that really can’t take advantage of the multiple GPUs. Those workstations weren’t doing any Octane or Redshift rendering; they were just phenomenal workstations for everything else. So they were just kind of like general workhorses. On the storage side, we had the 90 bay…

Christopher: Oh that’s right, you had the big 90… that product is our X90-SE Storage Enclosure. The X90-SE can provide over a Petabyte (1PB) of storage in a single 4U enclosure.

Jeffrey: Yes. So we used disc pooling on that and that can scale to crazy petabyte storage sizes. So it was really nice. The reason why we did the drive pooling versus a RAID type system was just a SAN solution would be prohibitively expensive for the type of scale that we were doing. We were doing about 300 gigabytes per day on average. So over time, the SAN would just get very, very expensive and RAID was just too dangerous of a recovery time. Even with RAID 6, there’s too much chance for multi disc failure and losing data. So we could have in level redundancy with drive pooling and using the kind of flash storage as the hot tier and the NVMe flash memory solved the performance issues for us. So it was a really nice video archive tool that was, compared to what most studios spend on SAN storage, a fraction of the price. It was just great. For our bulk pipeline, that was actually cloud based, but we had at the main studio, we had the NVMe Storage Server X24 as type of edge cache to the cloud.

Christopher: You got very excited about our i-X Mediaworkstation which is the full-size tower which you can expand to 4 GPUs, or the i-X mini which is up to two GPUs?

Jeffrey: The one that was kind of my favorite was the i-X but all of them were kind of perfect for their niche. The big i-X2 quad GPU Xeon system, you just could not beat those systems for rendering. It was just rock solid and a workhorse for rendering and stuff. For anyone doing heavy GPU rendering, the i-X2 is just amazing.

And then in a general system where you’re doing both animation and some GPU rendering but maybe you’re doing the bulk of your rendering cloud based or on a farm, rather than locally on the scene, the i-X was just really great. You can do a local test render and stuff and have a really good idea because the dual 1080s are fast cards, and now you can throw in 1080 TI cards or pick your choice, depending on how much RAM you want and the systems—but also even the little minis were just general workstations and they were just great for size and performance. They were unstoppable, and those could be upgraded to a dual card setup if need be, to kind of bring them up to the level of the i-X systems that we had and so, yeah. They were all just phenomenal systems and very flexible for growth over time.