Thinkbox Software - High Volume Compute Management: VFX/Rendering at Cloud Scale

1. Thinkbox Software – Deadline
Compute Management: Rendering at Cloud Scale
Mike Owen
Developer - Thinkbox Software UK

2. "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

3. DEADLINE - Components
2 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.

4. Monitor

5. DEADLINE - Jigsaw

6.  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

7. 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?

8. REMOTE
Office
LOCAL Office
Database &
Repository
CLOUD Region
(on demand)
Pop-Up Cloud
API
Render anywhere!
Take advantage of public
and private clouds.
No vendor lock-in.
No middle-man fees.
No restrictions on your
pipeline.
Public Cloud

9. Deadline Balancer
Launches 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

10. 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

11. 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

12. Deadline VMX Improvements
Improved 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 Templates
Create 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 Transfer
Build asset awareness into Deadline jobs.
Jobs won’t render until all assets are available.
Missing assets will be automatically transferred.
Future Features

13. Deadline DEMO - sales@thinkboxsoftware.com
Deadline BETA - beta@thinkboxsoftware.com