Case Study 2: Sony Pictures Imageworks
Sony Pictures Imageworks has had a lion's share of the recent big budget visual effects movies.
If you are a regular moviegoer, the list of titles that the digital production company has worked on will be very familiar; Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Cast Away, Charlie's Angels, Hollow Man, Contact, Godzilla and Starship Troopers, not to mention the upcoming and highly anticipated Spider-Man, Stuart Little 2 and Charlie's Angels 2. Imageworks will also embark on its first all Computer Graphics film, AstroBoy, in 2002.
These productions push the limits of visual effects techniques and test the limits of today's computer technologies. Sony Picture Imageworks works hard to stay on top of the technology curve to ensure it can continue to bring the latest jaw-dropping effects to movie screens around the world.
The company has some of the finest artists in the business, and they require tools that can keep pace with their vision for the visual effects of tomorrow. That's why Sony Pictures Imageworks elected to evaluate Intel® Itanium™ processor workstations from Hewlett-Packard.
Today's audiences demand better, more astounding effects. Each movie frame must have more and more detail. From a technology standpoint the sheer volume of data that defines a single frame of the next blockbuster movie can be equal to the amount of information in one copy of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. There are 24 frames in every second of movie. Multiply this by the number of seconds in a minute and the number of minutes in a movie and you can begin to see how tremendously complex it has become to make a visual effects movie.
And it doesn't stop there. Tomorrow's movies will be higher in resolution than the movies of today. The sheer amount of data involved can test 32-bit workstation architectures.
The IA-32 specification only allows a maximum of 2GB of physical memory. This means that in the animation process for sets over that limit, resources must be focused on optimizing the sets to fit into the available memory space. Remove this limit and the artists would easily be able to work with longer, more detailed animations. In rendering, the processors would be able to address many gigabytes of RAM for faster rendering of more complex scenes.
A senior engineer in Sony Picture Imageworks' software department, Evan Smyth, describes the challenge he and the animators face: “Entire datasets required to get the visual effects of today and tomorrow are going above 2GB. An entire scene and all the data that's going into it, including the lighting and that sort of thing, can easily go over 2GB.
“Since a 32-bit architecture can handle a limited amount of physical memory, everyone in the industry who works on 32-bit workstations has to work in a different way. Those of us who are building the most challenging visual effects will also be spending time optimizing for this limit, or working with lower resolution models when we're animating. It's part of the production process.
“In a 64-bit future, we could work with higher-resolution models, and we could dispense with the necessity of developing optimizations for 32-bit architectures. Itanium has the headroom we need in memory addressability and the performance to do this so we can work on a newer generation of visual effects.”
Bruce Dobrin is a Senior Engineer from systems R&D. He has had the same experience: “We are continuing to exceed the hard 2GB limit for a processes we are running today. There are ways we have developed that allow us to work around that issue but the optimum solution is to provide platforms that could access more than 2GB of memory. Then we could spend less time optimizing and focus all our efforts instead on creating newer effects that will challenge your next generation Itanium processors. We believe that 64-bit computing will be very important.”
“Alias|Wavefront's Maya is our primary interactive desktop around here, so we tested that first. It performed well on the HP workstation i2000 and the workstation was extremely stable. Our initial tests of Maya were considered successful. We believe that Itanium will be an important platform for Sony Pictures Imageworks in the longer-term.”
Sony Pictures Imageworks tested modeling and animation performance on Maya. Other tasks that Sony Pictures Imageworks is considering the Itanium processor family for include rendering and compositing. The company currently has a 1000 processor render farm, divided between 600 IA-32 systems and 300 SGI UNIX systems.
The Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing (EPIC) architecture in the Itanium processor family combines a number of powerful software and hardware refinements that accelerate floating point performance, memory throughput, and parallel performance. The net result is an architecture that today can work on six instructions per clock cycle. This combination of speed and parallelism translates into powerful performance benefits for companies like Sony Pictures Imageworks.
It means that the Itanium processor can do more in less time than its competitive 64-bit architectures, and it has greater scalability than its 32-bit counterparts.
Furthermore, Intel's expertise in processor manufacturing means that it has leading 64-bit price/performance today, and is likely to extend that lead tomorrow.
Amit Agrawal heads up the Software Department for Sony Pictures Imageworks. He is interested in deploying Itanium processor-based systems into the render farm: “One place that we have also run into limitations with memory addressibility is in rendering, which is also floating point intensive. Rendering is an obvious task that could benefit from 64-bit performance, but price-performance is highly important for a node in a render farm. Since we expect the Itanium processor family to give us the best bang for the buck in price performance, rendering will be a task we will begin early with the Itanium processor family.
“Near real-time high-speed compositing would also be another important area in which the Itanium processor family will excel, largely thanks to its multimedia instruction set and its wide memory bandwidth.”
Compositing is a technique in which two or more images that are created separately are layered over the top of each other to create a single image. The layers are made of millions of 32 bit pixels that are combined mathematically to create a seamless picture. In a movie-quality composited image, there should be no indication that the image was ever separated. Like rendering, it is highly processor and bandwidth intensive.
Sony Pictures Imageworks has a list of 3rd party applications that they would like to see ready for the deployment on the Itanium processor family, including Maya, RenderMan, Discreet's Inferno, Side Effects Software's Houdini, and Adobe Photoshop. Some of these applications, like Houdini, are already available on the Itanium architecture, others are in the process of being ported.
Itanium is ideal for the entertainment industry
The Itanium processor family architecture is able to rise to the challenge of such tasks, offering a number of benefits to the entertainment industry, including:
64-bit addressibility to allow the memory scalability and addressability for the future.
superior floating point performance for continuing performance improvements in the fields of animation and rendering.
high level of parallelism for fast throughput of highly complex computations and image data sets.
Today's 32-bit processors allow a maximum of 2GB of physical memory, but the HP workstation i2000 can be loaded with 16GB or more of RAM. The extra capacity afforded by 64 bit systems' architecture is greater than that of 32 bit systems by a factor of 4 billion.
Floating point performance is critical to many digital content creation applications specifically used in modeling, animating, and rendering.
The EPIC architecture does not disappoint. It allows two 32-bit numbers to be worked on simultaneously in parallel. Its 128 80-bit floating point registers provide highly precise and fast floating point calculations, useful in complex physics engines and ray-tracing calculations. This sort of power is needed in providing realistic dynamic physics in animations, and also photorealistic renders. Rotating floating point registers allow many floating point loop iterations to run in parallel enabling more efficient execution.
The floating point performance of the HP workstation i2000 today is industry leading, according to results from the independent benchmarking organization SPEC.
All these features will be pressed into service in the future. Amit Agrawal explains: “In the past, image files used to be the limiting factor in defining our storage requirements. Lately we've been experiencing a trend where the data that goes into generating the image files is getting larger and larger. Final image files are now a constant size that is not increasing—for a movie it's about 1.5TB. But the data that goes into creating that movie is increasing at an extraordinary rate. We believe that the Itanium processor family has the potential to help us meet this challenge.
“Our audiences like to see complexity in some fashion in visual effects on the screen. This complexity can come in the form of an army of characters or in the form of finer, subtle details like the interactions of hair or feathers. To achieve this photorealism, we are always able to find ways of increasing the data set size, and that's the trend I see.”
EPIC is an architecture that has been built to handle complex data in large amounts. It has the memory bandwidth to provide wide channels for the data to flow through. It has powerful floating point and multimedia units that can carry out large calculations to a high precision in parallel. It will be able to address more than 4GB of memory and it has astounding future potential, as the architecture has a theoretical address limit of 18 billion gigabytes of memory.
As Sony Pictures Imageworks continues its leadership in the digital visual effects industry, the company's data set sizes will certainly continue to grow. It will be the workstations developed around the Itanium processor family that will meet the challenge.