Our vision for Digital Entertainment Creation encompasses one of a scalable on-demand infrastructure that follows the ups and downs of real life production cycles.

For some of you, especially in post-production, a high performance computing/networking environment is a critical differentiator. Manipulating multiple real time streams is a key capability that has a direct impact on the facility’s productivity. Autodesk Consulting has become expert in setting up ultra high performance solutions for centralized workflows. For example, one of our recent installations offers more than 100 TB of usable space and services more than half a dozen creative seats for grading or finishing with real time 2k streams, this means over 4000 MB/sec of real time performance !

Many of you have much simpler infrastructure needs but they do not seem simple to fulfill either.

Back in July, I visited several of our customers in Europe and it has been a reminder of how much of a headache it is to put together a cost efficient infrastructure to support an average-sized animation studio. Solutions do exist but they remain rather expensive. Providing artists and animators with a quiet and cool environment requires the relocation of the computers into a dedicated room which often means pricey extenders. Managing the deployment and the versioning of both commercial and in-house software is often a complex process that results in errors (wrong version gets used) or delayed adoption of new releases. Even powering and cooling down a render farm in the center of a big city like Paris or London has become expensive and even sometimes challenging as power requirements keep going up.  

We are seeing a trend to relocate compute farms and datacenters in places where real estate, network bandwidth and energy are cheap. This makes sense economically but also for the environment as these centers can be tied to renewable sources of energy like wind farms or hydro. We’d like our customers to be able to tap into these new centers for their infrastructure and focus on creative collaboration.

 To that end, we are working aggressively with different partners to put together solutions for “infrastructure on demand”. Several new virtualization technologies offer new ways of deploying graphics software within a firewall to optimize resources and ease the deployment of new releases. We’re also looking beyond the firewall to offer remote solutions. In the coming weeks, we will offer the ability to test drive and evaluate several of our 3d applications online just using a web browser, keep an eye on our Labs website (see labs.autodesk.com/technologies/trials/) . Yes, Maya in a browser is around the corner !

We are exploring Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-service but we are also interested in providing new capabilities on-line. Autodesk is already offering 7 different SaaS applications in various fields (I recommend dragonfly.autodesk.com and labs.autodesk.com/technologies/showroom if you have plans for home improvements!) . We’re also actively looking at extending our products with web services for collaboration, creative tasks and processing

CPU intensive tasks like rendering or simulation baking are great candidates to “get to the cloud” and be delivered as on-demand services. We are working with partners to solve the problem holistically including affordable bandwidth and storage, secure file transfers and transactions and of course, remote processing capabilities. By the way, moving rendering and simulation to specialized processors like GPUs is another good way to achieve efficiencies as you’ve seen in our 2010 products releases but I won’t get into a CPU vs. GPU conversation here :-)

Our technology crystal ball is as good (or as bad) as anyone else’s so we’re exploring many directions to make sure that you can leverage the latest in computing innovations and remain single-mindedly focused on creative tasks. That’s where the fun is in Digital Entertainment Creation!

Rock on,

-mp

PS: Don’t forget to put SketchBook Mobile (www.autodesk.com/sketchbookmobile ) on your iPhone/iPod and say bye-bye to napkins!