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The high performance guarantee

The solution designed by DUX Soft, based on AMD Opteron processors, helped its clients to derive lower TCO, high performance and power efficiency. By Vinita Gupta

DUX Soft creates technology, IT tools and applications that can be used to help build the right solutions for its clients in the Animation, Visual effects and Gaming (AVG) industry and the larger HPC industry in general. The key parameters for the ‘right solution’ are high performance, cost savings and reliability, and hence DUX Soft implemented AMD Opteron processors to provide its clients a robust solution.

Ensuring high performance

The boom in the AVG market in India is visible across service providers in this segment. Studios in India are expanding and are offering a variety of high-end services. The need for technology in this segment has increased tremendously over the past few years.

DUX Soft, a Mumbai-based infrastructure, HPC and Workflow solutions provider deals in solutions for the design, deployment and maintenance of IT infrastructure, high performance rendering and production pipelines. In addition, it offers remote rendering services to clients in the AVG industry through www.renderarm.com, which is a commercial utility computing facility.

The company has been offering the technology to a number of OEM players in the market to build the IT infrastructure of its clients. The verticals that DUX Soft caters to are—the AVG industry, structural engineering firms, architectural work tools providers, automobile manufacturing firms and SEZ park solution providers. To cater to the varying demands of each vertical, DUX

Soft employs a 'mix-and-match' approach. The solution needs to offer DUX Soft clients enhanced performance for both grid computing and cluster computing.

AMD technology in place

DUX Soft uses AMD Opteron processors on Dell servers deployed at its own ‘on-demand’ render farm running on them. The company also uses AMD based high-end laptops for its senior CG team. These laptops are capable of high compute and can bear heavy work loads.

DUX Soft has used AMD Opteron processors for a number of clients across India. These are typically animation studios, some of which also provide animation education. All of these studios are on an expansion mode and aim to reach anywhere between 75 and 300 seats in the near future from a present capacity of 30-50 seats each.

Krishna Prasad, Director and Chief Technology Officer, DUX Soft said, “The biggest ROI that we provide to our customers is high price/performance ratios and process efficiencies. We have adopted AMD technology so that we can achieve this objective. AMD technology provides clients high performance for a given cost. The client also has the double advantage of not having to invest a lot into infrastructure to adopt AMD technology. In the long run, they can benefit by a reduction in the running cost and capital cost of their IT infrastructure.”

For the resource-intensive process of rendering, DUX Soft offers its clients a unique service through remote rendering. The company uses SPARX, a software application that provides end-to-end production support for studios of all types and sizes, for this service. SPARX helps enable clients on the remote rendering site (www.renderarm.com) to automate the entire digital content production lifecycle. To manage the backend of this high compute environment, DUX Soft relies on AMD Opteron processors on Dell servers.

“Rendering requires enormous amount of computing power and as our business grew, our processing requirement grew multi-folds. This required us to upgrade our CPUs from Dual Cores to AMD Opteron Quad Core processors, which enhanced our computing power tremendously to support our computing requirements,” added Prasad.

One solution, multiple advantages

Along with high performance the solution designed by DUX Soft, based on AMD Opteron processors, enables DUX Soft customers several key benefits, like:

• Reduce or eliminate costly hardware purchases or rentals
• Avoid having to manage customer support, insufficient floor space, network configuration and installation, and software licensing
• Manage rendering expenses and future requirements with cost- and resource-estimating tools
• Pay only for render time and power utilized
• Enhance rendering processes to boost production by dramatically reducing processing time
• Extend and link existing in-house rendering resources with a remote animation pipeline
• Focus on creating animation, instead of managing rendering hardware

Going green

There is also growing awareness of the need to use technology that offers power-efficiency, along with enhanced performance. DUX Soft is evangelizing “green” computing among its clients. The company finds that AMD technology enables power savings, irrespective of the specific requirements of each vertical that DUX Soft deals in.

Arvind Chandrasekar, General Manager, Business Development, AMD explained, “The animation industry uses heavy amounts of compute for rendering and shading. A single frame requires huge amounts of data to be crunched. The naked eye recognizes 25 frames per second, and a movie lasts between 60 and 90 minutes, which means around 135,000 frames per movie. The high usage patterns in the animation industry make it one of the most demanding as far as computer performance goes.”

Thus by implementing AMD processors in its solution, DUX Soft helped its clients save money and at the same time increase performance.

vinita.gupta@expressindia.com