Case Study | Framestore & Avere
OVERCOMING GRAVITY
Alphonse Cuarón’s epic space story Gravity required visual effects studio Framestore to redesign its network and critical storage architecture.
around a primary storage capacity of 1.2 petabytes of tiered HDS (formerly Bluearc) storage sitting behind six high performance Mercury 110 heads. The core networking for the facility was upgraded to 10Gb and a new low latency Arista core switch was deployed to accommodate the huge increase in network traffi c.
Initial results on this confi guration were very favourable but as the reality of the rendering requirement became evident it also became clear that Framestore needed new methods to meet the computational needs of the render farm.
Accelerating storage
Even with its multiple BAFTAs, Golden Globes, Emmys and Oscars, visual effects studio Framestore must constantly stay ahead of the technology curve. The studio’s visual effects have brought life to many hit fi lms including Avatar, The Golden Compass, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Skyfall and upcoming space drama Gravity. Behind the scenes, the studio uses massive rendering power and storage performance that requires constant refreshing.
In 2011, Framestore was settling into the fi nal stages of a multi-year journey to complete its most ambitious undertaking to date – the delivery of the Alphonse Cuarón epic space story Gravity.
The Framestore team has invested considerable development in tools to provide metrics and analysis of technical resources used by production staff as they manage complex schedules and deliverables. It was clear from the onset that Gravity’s resource demands would
30 | May/June 2013 |
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be enormous, eventually scaling up to more than 15,000 processor cores at peak rendering. The classic production bottleneck happens as rendering hits full stride and the render-nodes consume all available storage bandwidth creating slowdowns on the artist and workstation side.
Framestore’s technology team were interested in partitioning the storage in such a way that rendering for Gravity would pull data from storage pools separate to those being used for the rest of the facility. The team wanted to ensure that there would be no disruption for other fi lms going through Framestore during this period including Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows, Wrath of the Titans and Lincoln as well as work within its Commercials division for customers such as Nestle, P&G, Pepsi and Volkswagen.
To support the projected load, Framestore undertook a project to completely rebuild its storage and networking infrastructure
A solution utilising solid state or Flash based disk would part of the conversation from the early days of the project. Framestore CTO Steve MacPherson explained that several competitive SSD-based solutions were considered. Everything from building their own system based on CacheFS software to adding SSDs to the newly installed core fi lers.
“Ultimately, Avere won the argument with its ability to deliver the type of metrics, analysis and identifi cation of hot fi les essential to production effi ciency. Simplicity is a key Framestore engineering design goal. Once we established the correct confi guration for the Avere system, we were able to just step back and let it do its thing.”
Reliable metrics are vital in the planning and early growth stages, according to MacPherson. Given the unpredictable nature of the rendering work, visibility on system load guides decision making. The more accurate the telemetry extracted from the system, the more accurate the planning around the use of resources.
“We are also very pleased with the support and technical knowledge of the Avere team at all levels – from the installation engineers
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