What fuelled the need for adopting HPC solutions at Maya Entertainment?
Over the past eighteen months, Maya Entertainment (MEL) has seen explosive
growth. There has been a rising adoption of very data-intensive formats. As a
result, we had to do a fundamental re-evaluation of all the building blocks of
our architecture. This, in effect, led us to the adoption of High Performance
Computing (HPC) in our environment.
What role does HPC play in the animation and visual effects space?
Animation and visual effects companies are in fact HPC facilities. Animation
software tools are advanced scientific processing algorithms. The process of
generating a CG image is a long series of floating point calculations. The
quantum of data places heavy computing demands on the infrastructure. HPC caters
to this need for data crunching and management capability.
How has the usage of HPC evolved over the years in the computer animation
and visual effects space? What emerging trends do you foresee?
Prior to the advent of HPCs, the field was the exclusive domain of costly
workstations like Silicon Graphics and Sun. Around the late 1990s, a quantum
shift occurred. The dominance of PCs democratized the industry and led to
explosive growth of small- and medium-sized studios worldwide. With the advent
of software like Photoshop, Maya, and 3D Studio Max, the number of studios doing
high-end work mushroomed. In the initial years, the focus was on desktop
performance. In recent years, however, a great deal of attention has been paid
to storage, rendering and networking as the nuts and bolts of the organization.
A severe problem lies in storing, moving and computing heavy data. As a
production studio, downtimes are also costly. Mirrored servers, long distance
collaboration, and virtualization of storage and computing are the trends that
will continue to drive the industry in the future.
Jai Natarajan, executive vice president, Maya Entertainment |
What is your long-term strategy in terms of HPC?
MELs growth in HPC will concentrate on getting the most out of the companys
investments in resources. Rather than monolithic solutions, we would look at
flexible and interoperable solutions.
Shipra Malhotra
shipram@cybermedia.co.in