VizWorld.com

If, like many people, you were dumbstruck to hear Adobe’s announcement that Creative Suite is dead and Long Live Creative Cloud, Lifehacker has a good job breaking down the salient points.  Perhaps the biggest one is this:

The desktop applications do not live in the cloud. You install them like you’ve always installed them. That said, they need to connect to the internet once a month to verify your membership.

So it’s not so much a “Cloud” as a “App Rental” service.  This means lots of things:

• Recurring revenue for Adobe (and expense for you, the user)
• No longer being able to single-pay for Photoshop anymore (Photoshop will now be a $20/month charge, or $240/year)
• Continuous upgrades – While you can decline upgraded when Adobe makes them available, I have a feeling that’s a feature that won’t last long.  That means plugin developers are in for a wild and bumpy ride as Adobe releases upgrades without their knowledge.
• No hardware relief – Adobe initially pitched the cloud as “You won’t need to buy massive hardware for regular upgrades!”.  Well, that’s not going to pan out (at least not for now), as it’s just regular applications that require all your local disk, RAM, and CPU/GPU for whatever your doing.

So in the end, it’s basically just a “money grab” for Adobe.  While a few people will save money renting Photoshop month-to-month as needed, the professionals will have to bite the $50/month ($600/year) to use it.  That’s far cheaper than the cost of buying it all now,  but less than the cost of buying a new version only every 3 or 4 years because you’ve developed a pipeline and workflow full of 3rd party applications and plugins tailored to your job.

Only time will tell how it goes for Adobe.  I suspect they’ll immediately lose some wealthy customers (US Government, large corporations) that are wary of IP Leakage related to the “cloud” aspect, and the budgetary changes it will require.  This is the chance for smaller players like Pixelmator and Acorn to steal some market share.

What’s your thoughts?

via What Photoshop’s Move to the Cloud Actually Means for You.

Graphics adobe, cloud

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Render Rocket, purveyor of a nice cloud-based rendering service with an impressive web-based control panel, is releasing the newest version of their product Mission Control at SIGGRAPH2011 next week.  But that’s not all, they’ve seen such high demand for their services that they’ve boosted their cloud power, adding more capabilities and dropping rendertimes even lower.

“Rendering in film and design is becoming more and more data intensive,” said John Morales, COO of Render Rocket. “Working with our technology partners, we’ve increased our storage capacity five-fold since last year. Our service platform is more robust and more secure, with stronger file security and system redundancy. This enables us to take on render jobs from single users and massive film studios alike, without any adverse affects on our system.”

The new version also boasts a nice development API, allowing studios and software developers to link RenderRocket right into their applications for automated processing.

Get all the details after the break.

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Science cloud, renderrocket

Intel has posted an article on using the Cloud to perform ray tracing in games. Normally, I am not a fan of the term Cloud, because of its overuse and hype. However, in this case, I will make an exception because it uses Intel’s Knights Ferry. What is Knight’s Ferry? Remember Larrabee? Larrabee was the codename for a GPGPU chip that Intel was developing, that was canceled. The follow-on project is called Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) project, with the first product being codenamed Knight’s Corner. Knight’s Ferry falls up under the MIC project. The article describes Knight’s Ferry as:

Intel code name Knights Ferry is the first-generation development platform for the Intel MIC Architecture. It includes a PCIe card that has a 32-core chip on it that is clocked at 1.2 GHz. The development platform is programmable with the regular tools and programming languages that developers regularly use. A bit further out there are plans for an Intel MIC Architecture-based product, code named Knights Corner, that will use 22nm manufacturing technology and will therefore be able to even have more than 50 cores on the chip.

The researchers used four server machines, each with a Knights Ferry PCIe card (32 cores, 4 threads per core). Each server also had a i7-980X processor, which has 6 cores running at 3.33 GHz. The thin client was a a small laptop, running on a Core2 Duo processor P9600 and with a 1280×800 screen.

Everything was connected over a Gigabit Ethernet LAN. Now, not everybody has Gigabit Ethernet, but this is a proof of concept, not a finished product. I suspect that Gigabit Ethernet is not necessary anyway. Sure, it gives you a lot of bandwidth, but from my own testing of remote visualization services cloud-based applications, it is the latency that is most important. If you are getting a 100 ms ping, then that means you can only get 10 frames per second, at best. You really need a connection with less than 33 ms ping time to get 30 frames per second, and it would be best if it was even lower.

Now if all of this sounds familiar, it is because we covered it last year in Wolfenstein Gets Ray Traced, On a Laptop. At the time, we did not know that they were using Knight’s Ferry. From the conclusion to the article:

Over the last sections it has been shown that ray tracing can offer a variety of new and interesting effects to games. Through this research using a cloud-based gaming setup with machines that utilize the Intel code name Knights Ferry development platform, ray-traced games with a high frame rate can already be achieved today.

Further progress could be made by optimizing the video codec used in order to be able to use it for even smaller devices such as netbooks and tablets. Instead of assuming a Gigabit Ethernet setup, optimizations for wireless networks could be investigated to bring the technology to handheld devices like smartphones. In order to cut down on the number of servers needed, it should be possible to develop support for using multiple Knights Ferry PCIe cards within a single machine. To increase image quality, several well-known post-processing techniques like HDR bloom and depth of field could be added. A smart solution on how to do anti-aliasing for ray tracing with high performance on the Knights Ferry platform could also be investigated.

via : Experimental Cloud-based Ray Tracing Using Intel® MIC Architecture for Highly Parallel Visual Processing

Hardware cloud, intel, knights ferry, larrabee, raytrace, raytracer, raytracing

Like so many other industries, Hollywood studies have begun to turn to “the cloud” to solve their computational problems.  That magical, mystical place where thousands of cores wait to do your bidding, and you don’t have to worry at all about the maintenance or upkeep of them.  A short piece at DataCenterKnowledge talks about some of the bigger entries into Cloud rendering this year (Pixar’s Toy STory 3, Dreamworks How To Train your Dragon, etc).

Like DreamWorks turning to HP, Hollywood needs quick access to massive amounts of compute power, yet only for the time it takes to produce the effects or movie, and then they don’t want to be stuck with data center that powered the film. The notion of cloud computing with access to the vast resources of servers, processing power and storage is thus an attractive proposition. “Our strategy going forward is to push as much as we can into the cloud,” says Darcy Antonellis, president of technical operations for Warner Bros. “When you can scale up or scale back so easily, that’s a big economic advantage.”

This is probably the biggest thing most companies see when they think cloud:  I can get the effective power of a supercomputer, without having to pay IT to manage it or the Power Bill to keep it running!

Of course, they forget all of the typical networking, security, and software issues that come with it.  But those are slowly being whittled away as more and more companies (both users and vendors) embrace the idea.

via Hollywood’s Render Farms Move to the Cloud « Data Center Knowledge.

Graphics, Hardware cloud, hpc

Mike Vizard has a piece in CTOEdge that shows just how easily you can miss the mark on a press release.  He starts off with the recent comments from NVidia’s Sumit Gupta about NVidia making a play for HPC with new Tesla and Project Denver designs.

What’s about to change, however, is that access to graphical processing units (GPUs) is about to get a whole lot less expensive thanks to cloud computing services. What that means, says Sumit Gupta, who heads up product management and marketing for Nvidia’s Tesla products, is that mainstream enterprise software, such as business intelligence applications, will be embedding visually-oriented analytics that will be processed in the cloud.

Then he goes on about how in the future you’ll be able to use the cloud of video encoding and gaming.

The real power behind NVidia’s argument is in the growing mountains of data.  Data that used to be easily visualized with a simple Bar Chart or Line Graph has grown beyond the ability of simple Windows Graphics to render with any usefulness.  You now need more advanced visualization methods like Treemaps and Heatmaps, not to mention Edge Bundles and network graphs.  These algorithms generally require hardware acceleration (if not require, then benefit greatly from) due to the complex nature of the computations involved (Edge bundles) or the difficulty in rendering (heatmaps).

Just imagine if Google or Tableau extended their charting ability to include iRay-style visuals (resolution-varying streamed rendering) of massive datasets.

via The Coming Graphics in the Cloud Revolution | CTO Edge.

Hardware, Science cloud, nvidia

HPC provider ‘Steam Engine’ has been making waves recently, with only 3 months under its belt, and most impressively they’ve even managed to rope in some big clients like Rising Sun Pictures who used their resources for the new Harry Potter film.  Of course, paramount when talking about ‘cloud computing’ is security.

“We obviously have concerns about security and we need to be satisfied by what’s offered. We wouldn’t use computers from this random place that we couldn’t see or inspect. Our clients are incredibly security concerned, given the sensitive nature of films in production and the sizable investment at stake,” Clark said.

Fortunately, they overcame security concerns

Stefan Gillard, Steam Engine’s commercial director, said that its HPC model is ideal for film development given that the data is stored in the tier-three-rated Global Switch facility, secured deep within the Harbour MSP datacentre in Sydney.

How do they manage all this computing horsepower?

Rising Sun Pictures runs 300 nodes in its render farm during the day, with an extra 150 available to it at night, as well as the extra grunt provided by Steam Engine, meaning that render jobs go quicker with fewer errors.

“We have a batch computer management system. You give it jobs and finds the best place to run them on our own computers and we then bolt nodes onto our existing render farm. Our program will push data onto the rented nodes as required,” Clark said.

Be sure to read the full article, it’s got lots of great detail on the storage scenario and how they managed to justify the cost.

via Harry Potter effects gurus turn to cloud – Business – News.

Hardware cloud, harry potter, hpc, rising sunk pictures

Cloud Computing?

At the recent HPC360 event, several people showed up talking about using “cloud resources” for HPC research.  Running big sim codes in the cloud isn’t a problem, in fact it’s not much different from how it’s done now.  The real sticky point is then doing the analysis and visualization with data in the cloud and resources in the cloud.  There aren’t many of these resources out right now, and the tools are a bit confusing.  Dassault Systemes’s Matt Dunbar said it best:

As Dunbar stated, “doing actual batch simulation in the cloud is reasonably straightforwared but doing 3D graphics post-processing is something that remains a question mark for us. There are a number of ways we can do that, but right now we’re trying to decide how best to do that.” This is a difficult decision because software architects are either faced with waiting for a long time or taking what might be a performance hit with their use of utility resources versus their own, slightly more time-intensive (due to wait time) use of workstations.

This is personally a big area of interest for me.  I really thought the Sun Visualization System was a great start, but it was a bit before its time and died in the Oracle acquisition (if not before).  Products like the TACC EnVision and Longhorn suite are a great step in the right direction, putting existing applications on remote resources through a single web-client.

Eventually, tho, we’re going to need smarter applications that can handle the kind of integrity and latency problems that come from super-huge runs.  Tools like EnSight and ParaView are already working on scaling to these larger systems, but still don’t gracefully handle the death of a node or graphics resource.  Of course, some will say that’s an MPI problem or an OS problem, and they’re right.  Exascale computing has lots of challenges, and I just hope that Visualization doesn’t get left behind as it has in the past.

via HPC in the Cloud: Weighing the Queue, Evaluating the Utility.

Science cloud, exascale, hpc

DreamWorks Animation has just signed a deal with Cerelink to ‘rent’ their cloud computing facilities for use in rendering upcoming projects.  It’s an interesting solution, forgoing the usual kinds of security and access restrictions that Hollywood studios typically require for upcoming films for the lower-cost and elastic nature of cloud computing resources.  So what is DreamWorks getting access to, exactly?

The Cerelink facilities include access to several thousand square feet of secure data centre space located in Rio Rancho, NM. That space is fed by redundant electrical power grids. It has access to LambdaRail (pdf), the 12,000 mile US coast-to-coast fast broadband network, and to a supercomputer at Encanto.

This offers a theoretical peak speed of 172 teraflops (peak theoretical speed) from its Altix ICE 8200 cluster, with 133 teraflops sustained operation. The ICE 8200 consists of 1,792 nodes (14,336 cores) of quad Xeon 3.0 GHz processors housed in 28 racks.

This is in addition to state tax rebates of up to 25% for work done in New Mexico, further reducing the costs.  So they effective get access to up to 14000 cores of compute power without having to deal with IT, cooling, maintenance, or any of the infrastructure costs, and only when they actually need it for work.

via DreamWorks signs cloud computing deal • The Register.

Hardware cloud, dreamworks

Felix, a renderer developed in partnership with Next Limit technologies (creaors of the Maxwell Renderer), aims to bring renderfarm power to everyone via the Cloud.  Similar in concept to vSwarm, you buy “credits” and then submit your job to be rendered on 40 to 160 cores in the cloud.

Unfortunately, it currently does not support Animation, only still renders, although that feature is coming soon.  The results are impressive tho, rendering the Benchwell scene in a mere 55 seconds.

felixrender.

Graphics cloud, felix, maxwell, renderer

Using Blender or Luxrender and need some serious horsepower for a render, but don’t own a renderfarm?  Well good news! vSwarm is attempting to bring the power of tools like Seti@Home and Folding@Home to render farms, allowing users worldwide to install a simple client on their machine and harnessing their unused compute time.

Currently in alpha, just install the client and let it run to start earning credits that you can then cash in to use for your own render jobs!  It’s still a bit quirky and in early alpha, but it does work (most of the time). Hit up their site for registration details, downloads, and instructions.

vSwarm: Free Render Farm – Cloud Computing for Rendering.

Graphics blender, cloud, luxrender, software, vswarm