Thinkbox Software – DeadlineCompute Management: Rendering at Cloud Scale

Mike OwenDeveloper - Thinkbox Software UK

"Deadline from Thinkbox Software has been reliable, stable and extremely customizable, handling our render farm at IKEA Communications AB since 2013"

- Sebastian Ek, Render Wrangler at IKEA Communications AB

IKEA Renders managed by DEADLINE

75% of Magazine is CGI, no Photos

DEADLINE - Client Pipeline @

http://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/CGSFeatures/CGSFeatureSpecial/building_3d_with_ike

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DEADLINE - Components2 software installers – Deadline Repo/DB and Deadline Client

Deadline Repository & MongoDB

• Consists of a MongoDB database and a shared file server -

//your/file/server

• One Repository per render farm.

Deadline Client

• Includes the Slave, Monitor and Pulse applications.

• Slaves run on the render nodes to control the rendering process.

• Monitor is used to view render jobs and render nodes.

• Client applications connect directly to the Mongo database and file server.

Monitor

DEADLINE - Jigsaw

FTrack, Shotgun, NIM, in-house system

SCM – Salt, Puppet, CF Engine, Chef, SCCM

IT Monitoring systems – Nagios, Zabbix, Zenoss

Python Scripting API

RESTful HTTP API

Python Standalone API

Command Line access

DEADLINE - Integration

A recent poll of 125 VFX studios around the world demonstrated the interest in moving compute [rendering, simulation] to the cloud:

Source: Shotgun Software Blog: http://blog.shotgunsoftware.com/2015/04/90-second-beer-poll-cloud-rendering.html

DEADLINE - Cloud Rendering?

REMOTE

OfficeLOCAL Office

Database &

Repository

CLOUD Region(on demand)

Pop-Up Cloud

APIRender anywhere!

Take advantage of public

and private clouds.

No vendor lock-in.

No middle-man fees.

No restrictions on your

pipeline.

Public Cloud

Deadline BalancerLaunches and Terminates VM Instances based on demand.

Launching and terminating VM instances by hand is tedious.

Saves on cost, disabling and enabling.

Balance across different AWS regions.

Pluggable (Python ) Balancing Algorithm.

eu-central-1

VM instance

VM instance

VM instance

VM instance

VM instance

eu-west-1

VM instance

VM instance

VM instance

Local and Amazon render nodes in the

same render farm

Local and Amazon render nodes

working on the same job

Connected to SSL Proxy Server

Usage Based Licenses

Buy in bundles of Pre-Paid Hours

Render in Minutes

Minutes consumed whilst Slave renders

3rd Party SDK - Select Partners

Info – www.deadlineondemand.com

Store - store.thinkboxsoftware.com

Deadline VMX ImprovementsImproved budget and cap flexibility.

Budgets based on amount to spend per day, per month, number of

concurrent cloud instances.

Support for AWS Spot Instances

AWS Cloud Formation TemplatesCreate an entire Deadline render farm infrastructure on AWS Cloud.

Create AWS Cloud render nodes to connect to an existing on premise Deadline render farm.

Automated Asset TransferBuild asset awareness into Deadline jobs.

Jobs won’t render until all assets are available.

Missing assets will be automatically transferred.

Future Features

Deadline DEMO - sales@thinkboxsoftware.com

Deadline BETA - beta@thinkboxsoftware.com