What if you could scale your rendering pipeline to near-limitless capacity- what would that mean for your studio? Learn how Amazon EC2 Spot and AWS Thinkbox Deadline can help scale your VFX and CG rendering pipeline, creating faster feedback cycles and most artist time focused on creating content, and how you can optimize your compute costs along the way. This session focuses on rendering workloads combining Deadline (an AWS rendering pipeline management tool) and Spot for scalable cost-effective computing. Find out how real customers working on Hollywood productions are integrating their pipelines with AWS to realize the elasticity and scale provided by Amazon EC2, as well as how they intend to leverage AWS in the future to scale their superpowers.

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Scale Your Studio
Rendering with Spot and Deadline on AWS
Chris Bond
Director, Founder
AWS Thinkbox, Amazon EC2
C M P 2 0 2
Jason Fotter
CTO, Co-Founder
FuseFX

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Customer example: Hybrid rendering pipeline
Company/Studio On-Premises AWS Cloud
Deadline Render
Nodes
Assets S3Studio’s Asset
File Server
Deadline Database
and Repository
Deadline AWS
Portal-link/RCS
Deadline AWS
Render Nodes
EC2 Spot
Deadline 10 AWS
Portal infrastructure
Secure Connection/
AWS Direct Connect
Amazon EBS
Volume

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Customer example: Hybrid rendering pipeline
Company/Studio On-Premises AWS Cloud
Deadline Render
Nodes
Assets S3Studio’s Asset
File Server
Deadline Database
and Repository
Deadline AWS
Portal-link/RCS
Deadline AWS
Render Nodes
EC2 Spot
Deadline 10 AWS
Portal infrastructure
Secure Connection/
AWS Direct Connect
Amazon EBS
Volume

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Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (Amazon EC2) purchasing options
?

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To optimize Amazon EC2, combine purchase options
for fault-tolerant,
flexible, stateless workloads such as
Rendering

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Deadline 10: AWS Portal

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The simple rules of Spot Instances
Set it and forget it pricing
—no bidding, big savings
Is same as on-demand
and RIs: same hardware, same
capabilities, same choice of
instances, same geo footprint
(regions & AZs)
Use diverse instance fleets
to spin up 1MM core
(60k+ instances) clusters

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What about interruptions?
95%

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Adrift, image courtesy of Milk Visual Effects

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Customer trends: Early assumptions
Small-Medium studio
Peaks and valleys over a week of production
Renders peaking at just over 24 hours

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Customer trends: Early assumptions
Small-Medium studio
Customer told us they wanted to reduce these peaks with AWS Cloud rendering

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Customer trends: Early assumptions
Large studio
Submission over a day of production
Renders peaking at over 48 hours

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Customer trends: Early assumptions
AKA

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Customer trends: More capacity
With more capacity, customers can iterate more frequently
Artists spend more time creating

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Customer trends
Customers are scaling their on-prem capacity
They are saying more frequently
Time becomes

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Customer trends: Scaling
Memory (GiB) vCPUs
c3.8xlarge 60 32
c4.8xlarge 60 36
c5.9xlarge 72 36
c5.18xlarge 144 72
m4.10xlarge 160 40
m4.16xlarge 256 64
m5.12xlarge 192 48
m5.24xlarge 384 96
r3.8xlarge 244 32
r4.8xlarge 244 32
r4.16xlarge 488 64
Consider your requirements
Diversify your Spot Fleet request
60 Gigabytes of RAM
Minimum 32 vCPU

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Customer trends: Scaling
Deadline 10 helps you
pick appropriate instances!

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Hybrid rendering pipeline
Company/Studio On-Premises AWS Cloud
Deadline Render
Nodes
Assets
Amazon S3
Studio’s Asset
File Server
Deadline Database
and Repository
Deadline AWS
Portal-link/RCS
Deadline AWS
Render Nodes
EC2 Spot
Deadline 10 AWS
Portal infrastructure
Secure Connection/
AWS Direct Connect

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Deadline 10 infrastructure
User submits Job AssetsAsset server Deadline cloud link server Deadline AWS
Render Nodes
Deadline 10
infrastructure
Secure
connection
(SSH)
Company/Studio On-premises AWS Cloud

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Infrastructure flexibility

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AWS Thinkbox Marketplace
Usage-based licensing (UBL)
Per minute licensing for applications
https://marketplace.thinkboxsoftware.com

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Amazon Machine Images
Default Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
Ability to install your own software
Supports “bring your own license” (BYOL)
in addition to per-minute UBL licenses

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EC2 G3 instance type
• All based on NVidia Tesla M60
• g3.4xl is half of one M60 with 2048 CUDA cores and 8GB MEM
• Multiple GPUs for CUDA processing/rendering, does not enhance viewport performance
• Supports up to 4 x monitors with max 4096 x 2160 resolution
MODEL vCPU RAM
G
P
U
MEMORY CUDA OD price/hr (Linux) OD price/hr (Win) SPOT price/hr (Linux) SPOT price/hr (Win)
g3.4xlarge 16 122 1 8 2048 $1.14 $1.876 $0.348 $1.078
g3.8xlarge 32 244 2 16 4096 $2.28 $3.752 $0.684 $2.156
g3.16xlarge 64 488 4 32 8192 $4.56 $7.504 $1.368 $4.312
Graphics instance

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Location AWS Region Public Direct Connect
Atlanta us-east-1 (N. Virginia) ~18 ms ~13 ms
London
eu-west-2 (London) ~10 ms ~2 ms
eu-west-1 (Dublin) ~14 ms ~10 ms
Los Angeles
us-west-1 (N. California) ~15 ms ~11 ms
us-west-2 (Oregon) ~35 ms ~29 ms
New York
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) ~15 ms ~8 ms
us-east-2 (Ohio) ~20 ms ~16 ms
Montreal
ca-central-1 (Montreal) ~8 ms ~2 ms
us-east-1 (N. Virginia) ~22 ms ~16 ms
Paris eu-west-3 (Paris) ~8 ms ~2 ms
Vancouver us-west-2 (Oregon) ~16 ms ~12 ms
DISCLAIMER: All latency figures depend on multiple factors and are NOT guaranteed
Measured latency

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Simplified studio topology
Company/Studio On-Premises AWS Cloud
Zero client/
desktop
Assets S3 Deadline AWS
Render Nodes
EC2 Spot
Secure Connection/
Direct ConnectArtists g3 Instance

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Related breakout
Wednesday, 11/28
Remote Workstations in the Cloud for Content Production
2:30pm – 4:45pm | Venetian, Level 4, Marcello 4403, T1

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Jason Fotter—CTO, Co-Founder

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Impacting the world through imagery
• Award winning visual effects facility, 10 awards and 16 nominations
• Visual effects for television
• ~350 employees, LA-NY-BC, 100+ projects

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Television trends
More content than ever before
4K and HDR are the new normal
Continue to push limits of VFX

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10-year evolution
2008
2010
2012
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
LA
NYBC
FULL!
Growing Cloud
LA
NY
BC
Next
Phase

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Current challenges
More People More Computers
and software
More Rendering

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Extending into the cloud
AWS Direct
Connect
Deadline DB and Repo Local Render Farm
Isilon X410 Clusterm4.16xlarge with EBS Custom Sync solution for
Studio Assets
Spot Fleet
AMI
Amazon VPC

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Extending into the cloud at all locations
AWS Direct
Connect
m4.16xlarge with
Amazon EBS
Spot Fleet
AMI
Amazon VPC
Custom Sync solution for
Studio Assets

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911―Earthquake

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Storage for VFX rendering
Capacity IOPS Latency Throughput

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Storage upgrades
4 x m4.16xlarge
with magnetic EBS
6 x m4.16xlarge
with SSD EBS
38k IOPS
3 GB/sec
80k IOPS
15 GB/sec

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Cloud storage architecture
5TB/10k IOPS/1GB sec 100 Spot
Instances
20TB/50kIOPS/5GB sec 500 Spot
Instances
100TB/100k IOPS/10GB sec 5000 Spot
Instances
Amazon S3
File per object
sync to
Amazon S3

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What’s next
Desktops in the cloud
AI/Machine learning
Virtual infrastructure presents new
opportunities and ideas
Challenge of syncing files
Global VFX company in the cloud

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Thank you!

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Conclusion

50. Thank you!
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