CDW StudioCloud quadruples core density with AMD EPYC™ CPUs

CDW StudioCloud quadruples core density for visual effects (VFX) rendering with AMD EPYC™ processors

Delivering half a million physical cores for content creation with greater efficiency by choosing AMD EPYC CPUs

High-performance computing is now central to creating film and television content that audiences love. IT solutions provider CDW developed its StudioCloud service to give content producers the flexible resources they need to deliver Animation and VFX as quickly and cost-effectively as possible.

The original plan was to attract one of the world’s largest superhero franchises to Canada for VFX rendering, which required a burst capacity of 1,000 render nodes. At that time, there wasn’t 1,000 render nodes in total across all the Vancouver studios. Now CDW StudioCloud has a fleet of 500,000 physical cores of compute to offer its customers, on par with the largest studios in the world. AMD EPYC™ processors provided the density that the company needed to deliver this huge data center fleet.

More render cores in less space

“CDW StudioCloud provides bespoke render, storage, and artist workstations designed for the world's leading animation and visual effects studios,” says Kris Kostiuk, Global Director, Business Development, Media & Entertainment, CDW StudioCloud. “We also host entire studios in our data centers across North America, and have grown with global client deployments in Australia, Europe and the UK. We help studios secure flexible cloud-like economics with dark fiber connectivity so clients can connect directly via low latency and high bandwidth as an extension of their on-premises technology. Our secure, air-gapped architecture has also helped CDW StudioCloud become an early adopter of the updated Trusted Partner Network (TPN+) platform powered by the Motion Picture Association.”

Originally, CDW StudioCloud utilized CPUs from another vendor. But CDW StudioCloud’s advisory council recommended that AMD EPYC processors would deliver a performance and core density improvement. “Our clients look for the best price, performance and power consumption,” says Kostiuk. “We talked to AMD and Dell Technologies to put together a solution delivering the most cores at the best price with the lowest power footprint. We benchmarked and tested together with our clients’ production render jobs in software such as Autodesk® Arnold or Pixar® RenderMan® on our StudioCloud lab technology. We used a 2U four-node Dell PowerEdge server with eight AMD EPYC 64-core processors, running benchmark render tests versus the existing CDW StudioCloud render nodes and clients’ render farms based on alternative processor brands.”

“Density is the key,” continues Kostiuk. “The EPYC core counts attracted us to Dell and AMD. We could replace three to four racks of our old compute with one rack of Dell PowerEdge servers powered by AMD CPUs. It was mind-blowing that we could use the same 35-kilowatt rack power in our data centers to fit 7,168 physical cores, whereas before we were in the 2,000-core range. This density allowed us to grow in the way we needed. We could retire some of our oldest compute without taking on more space and power, enabling massive energy efficiency.”

Adding 400,000 cores in two years

It’s important for studios to have consistency in quality when there’s a change in underlying technology. “Some clients mix AMD workloads with other CPU vendors on the same project. Upon testing, our clients validated that the resulting output frames are visually indiscernible between each other,” says Kostiuk.

CDW StudioCloud also discovered the core density warranted a different approach to how jobs were allocated within the render farm. “Some studios want to deliver first frames as quickly as possible, so they put lots of cores on a single job,” says Kostiuk. “That means four render nodes in a 2U PowerEdge server with 128 cores and either 512GB or 1TB of memory per node. Alternatively, they can spread the workload and take advantage of mass threading. Since you have 128 cores per node, you can carve that up into multiple jobs in parallel using lower core counts and a subset of the memory. From a software licensing standpoint, you're also not paying per core, you're paying per node, so you can be more efficient with your render jobs. Whether a client wants to load up multiple jobs or get first frames returned quickly, having that high core density from AMD EPYC really delivers.”

“Without AMD EPYC CPUs it would not be possible to satisfy the increase in rendering workload demand we see today,” says Kostiuk. “Our clients could not afford to purchase alternative CPUs at the same scale. You are going to get more frames completed with AMD. Our clients are only purchasing new AMD render now and so are we. In the first eight years of StudioCloud, we grew to a little over 100,000 physical cores with another CPU vendor. In the last two plus years, we've added another 400,000 cores, and all of them have been AMD.”

Growing StudioCloud sustainably

The maximum that we can fit into a rack is defined by power density,” says Kostiuk. “With our previous CPU vendor, we were deploying 64 nodes to a rack. With AMD CPUs running on Dell servers, we hit the 35-kilowatt power footprint at 56 nodes of dual 64-core CPUs, so 7,168 cores in a rack. But those 7,168 cores would have required three to four racks from our previous CPU vendor. That has dramatically improved our energy efficiency. At CDW, we're heavily focused on reducing our power footprint and we have surpassed an estimated 54,770 metric tons of annual CO2 sequestration. We know we're going to continue to grow, but we want to do it sustainably.”

“Partnerships are the key for CDW, and Dell is one of our largest,” says Kostiuk. CDW leverages its Dell Titanium Black partnership to deliver volume purchase program savings, evaluation opportunities, and Dell Ready Stock for inventory. “We're competing with hyper-scalers, which can turn on compute at a moment's notice. You pay a premium for that agility, whereas CDW StudioCloud can still deliver very quickly at scale, for one fifth of the price. If we need to go beyond our existing fleet, thanks to Dell Ready Stock we have the assets there in the warehouse that we can deliver anywhere our clients need within a week. CDW StudioCloud has approximately 100,000 physical cores sitting in inventory, brand new unopened boxes that can be deployed whether we need them in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles, London, Europe, Australia or India. That gives us a lot of flexibility.”

“We're currently on 2nd and 3rd Gen AMD EPYC CPUs, picking the best of breed SKU for our clients. We initially chose the 64-core 7662 for our first adoption of AMD, and then the 7713. Going forward with AMD EPYC, we will use the 128-core and beyond. Our next generation will leverage hybrid liquid cooling and have many more cores per rack and double our RAM footprint. We’ve found that AMD EPYC CPUs represent one of the industry's best solutions for core density and performance. The depth and level of partnership with the AMD team, alongside Dell, has been vital to our success and the growth of StudioCloud. Together with AMD and Dell we help the world’s largest animation and VFX studios render more business value with CDW StudioCloud.”