Clouds gather for GPU-based rendering
Published 03 February 2011
Posted by Greg Corke
Bunkspeed’s Cloud Solution helps users publish interactive photorealistic scenes or 3D content to the Web. Image modelled in SolidWorks, rendered in Bunkspeed Shot
While there’s isn’t exactly a shortage of cloud providers offering arrays of CPUs that wouldn’t be out of place in a science fiction movie, there is nowhere near the same choice when it comes to GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). This is changing, however. Last year Peer 1 Hosting, a global online IT hosting provider, delivered what it described as the industry’s first large-scale, hosted GPU cloud. Amazon Web Services also started offering cloud-based GPU resources in November 2010.
Both cloud providers currently use Nvidia hardware. Peer 1 Hosting runs the RealityServer 3D web application service platform, developed by Nvidia-owned mental images. This uses Nvidia Tesla GPUs and 3D web services to deliver interactive and photorealistic applications over the web using the iRay renderer.
Of course, demand for GPU-based cloud computing will come from the software sector and last month Bunkspeed, the developer of specialist 3D rendering and animation software, introduced its Bunkspeed Cloud Solution. It utilises Bunkspeed Shot Pro and mental images’ RealityServer and helps users publish interactive photorealistic scenes or 3D content to the Web. These can then be accessed from anywhere in the world, on almost any device via a web browser. It also helps non-CAD decision-makers view and review such projects.
Bunkspeed is the first major rendering software developer to fully utilise GPU-based cloud resources and introduce new rendering workflows. In theory, any software developer that uses mental images iRay as a rendering solution should also be able to do this without too much trouble. This includes Dassault Systèmes with Catia Live Rendering, Real Time Technology with RTT DeltaGen and Autodesk with 3ds Max. With Autodesk already showing interest in cloud-based rendering and collaboration, we would be surprised if the company didn’t unveil a GPU-based technology soon.
Of course the question arises: does it really matter to the end user what hardware is being used to render a scene? The answer is: probably not. What are important are speed, cost, quality and the ability to benefit from new workflows, and the market will ultimately decide how important cloud-based GPU rendering will become.
Comments:
From the point of view of the user of the rendering software I agree that what’s important are the results, but if the results are different with different implementations of software, you pretty quickly get to a point where you need to fully understand the entire stack provided by and required by each solution to make informed decisions about what you are going to adopt and when. Which can be a different role in large organizations, but in smaller organizations it is often the same person. I work for mental images, the creators of the iRay and Reality Server software components used by Bunkspeed, both of these are designed to exploit GPU clusters. As a result iRay is able to provide a completely different approach to rendering physically accurate results, not photorealism, that drastically simplifies the setup time by eliminating the need to configure the rendering engine. iRay runs fine on CPU clusters, but its *way* faster on GPU clusters. Again the point of this is all of that information is intertwined and to fully understand the difference in quality, speed and cost, someone in the organization needs to understand all the details.
Posted by Jim Merry on 07 February 2011 at 03:56 PM
I second that, no one really wants to know what hardware the rendering is running on, what matter is speed and costs and not to forget if the scene you want to render does fit onto that particular hardware.
What I find most suspicious is that these cloud solutions are propagated like there is no problem with speed of data transfer (transfer your scene to cloud) nor the lacking security. Automotive company or one of their suppliers rendering stuff on cloud hardware somewhere in nowhere ? Never ever going to happen. You rendering your private project ... probably.
But let’s wait and see where this is going. I myself would’nt bet my company onto this (if I had one) ...
Posted by Peter Schmidt on 04 February 2011 at 12:04 PM