DUX Soft Enhances Remote Rendering With AMD Opteron Processors

DUX Soft is a company dedicated to addressing the ever-increasing needs and of the animation, gaming and VFX industry. Catering to the much demanding environment of this industry, Dux Soft involves itself from setting up the IT infrastructure from scratch and also managing it, while it incidentally also hosts an on-demand remote rendering facility. As India is progressively emerging as a hub for animation and VFX, Dux Soft felt that it needed to increase its processor speed to keep in line with the requirements of its clients.

Rendering is one of the most important processes of animation, which is highly compute intensive and demanding. In its essence rendering is a batch computing process that results in the final set of images, which actually go into the making of the animation film. Explains Krishna Prasad, CTO, Dux Soft, “Fortunately rendering is a process which can be easily parallelised. If we have enough resources, each frame can be rendered by different computers. Such an array of computers used for rendering is called a Render Farm.”

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Managing a Render Farm is a challenge, as one has to deal with multiple jobs (scenes) and frames being rendered simultaneously. “As our business grew, the requirements for High Performance Computing and processing requirement grew multifold and hence we shifted from Intel’s Dual Core processors to AMD Opteron Quad Core based processors,” adds Prasad. “Our strength lies in providing our customers with ROI on high price/performance ratios and process efficiencies and this implementation is line with our objective.”

The only challenge faced by his team during the initial implementation phase was the non-detection of Quad Core based CPUs in the first boot. Once the system BIOS and other drivers were updated the processors got detected.

The implementation has helped Dux Soft provide virtually unlimited on – demand rendering capability. It can now effectively link its in-house rendering resources to a remote animation capacity and help clients make use of a stable ‘pay-per-use’ on demand rendering service – which means effective ROI. “Overall, AMD has enabled us to provide a cost-effective on demand solution to shorten the time to market animation processes,” concludes Prasad.

With this implementation, DUX Soft is in the process of adding more teeth to its image-rendering platform. Deployment of a reality server essentially to outsource visualisation processes is also in the offing in addition to multi-location compute farms.