American Cinematographer - August 2011 - 76

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Mobileviz ProvidesRolling Hub By Michael Goldman

When Idaho company Silverdraft LLC began planning a sophisticated data center that might, in combination with local tax incentives, lure visual-effects-heavy productions to Boise, the company hired Srinidhi Varadarajan, the director of the Center of High-End Computing Systems at Virginia Tech, to be the systems architect. But after Varadarajan designed a much smaller computing infrastructure than the team thought possible, Silverdraft decided to make the technology mobile. The result, Mobileviz, offers massive computing power and sophisticated post tools that can neatly visit stages or locations. “Once Dr. Varadarajan gave the data system a smaller footprint, we realized it should be mobile,” explains Michael Cooper, who is in charge of business development for Silverdraft. “The idea goes hand in glove with what filmmakers have been doing with virtual productions, except that companies won’t have to build those infrastructures from the ground up. They can have us bring it to them wherever they happen to be shooting.” Silverdraft hired Advance Systems Services to convert and build out a 53'-long trailer that expands in width from 8' to 16' with “pop-out” sections. Video and data integration was completed with the help of Armadillo of Redondo Beach, Calif. Half of the trailer houses two 200-amp generators and a control room, where the supercomputer and all workstations, routers and other hardware systems live. The second half of the trailer is a functional post facility capable of running up to 12 work stations, all networked with Infiniband fiber. Varadarajan notes that Mobileviz relies on a single, sophisticated “brain” to crunch data from different areas of a project simul76 August 2011

taneously rather than requiring entirely separate systems, and it does so in a mobile setting. He says the computing system can process up to 350 teraflops of data (350 trillion floating-point operations per second) through 20Tb of Micron solid-state storage that is built into a cluster of 1,536 computer cores on the truck. Plus, the network that connects all the trailer’s systems runs at 40 Gbps. “This enables high-speed interconnectivity both externally and to internal shared-storage systems,” he says. “This feature is particularly important during data ingest on set from multiple highresolution cameras and/or other data sources. The presence ofthis high-speed network enables line-rate data ingest directly into our storage systems. Because the same high-speed network is used internally, it enables processing and rendering operations to run a lot faster off the same shared storage used for ingest. Each of our two storage systems is capable of sustained performance of two gigabytes per second, which significantly accelerates rendering performance.” In other words, he says, the big advantage of Mobileviz “lies in its ability to act as a one-stop shop that provides the entire pipeline, from previsualization to post rendering. The ability to integrate the differing requirements of these workflow stages in a single systems infrastructure differentiates us from typical data centers.” Mobileviz was recently put through its paces on a render job for Sony Pictures Imageworks. Silverdraft officials declined to discuss the project in detail, but Varadarajan says the studio “averaged over 600 Mbps, 24-7, for three weeks straight during a production render on Mobileviz. That kind of sustained bandwidth is nearly impossible to achieve over the Internet to a remote rendering facility, and it would also be prohibitively expensive. Secondly, cloud rendering would require production assets to be transferred off site, which presents significant security issues. Because Mobileviz can physically

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American Cinematographer - August 2011

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