Sony Unveils Cell-Based Image Processing Appliance

By Michael Feldman

August 12, 2008

Digital content creation is an almost perfect type of application for an HPC cluster. For example, computer generated (CG) animation for feature-length movies is typically run on large render farms made up of low-cost hardware built from x86-based compute nodes. Generating images for each frame can be accomplished more or less independently, which means the whole process maps very well to the highly-parallel but loosely-coupled architecture of a cluster.

The only problem is the demand for more sophisticated digital imagery and higher resolutions is outstripping the ability of the hardware to keep up. At DreamWorks, rendering time for CG movies doubles every three years, even on top of Moore’s Law improvements in raw compute power. That means studios are building bigger and bigger render farms and using increasing amounts of power to produce CG animated movies. That’s why there is growing interest in using non-CPU acceleration technologies, like GPUs and the Cell processor, to speed production work and, at the same time, deliver savings in energy and space.

With that in mind, Sony has unveiled the BCU-100, a digital content creation appliance based on Sony’s PlayStation 3 technology. The announcement was made today at SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles.

The BCU-100 is a 1U box that incorporates the compute hardware found in the PS3 — the Cell Broadband Engine integrated with the RSX graphics processor, a GPU developed by NVIDIA and Sony. The Cell processor delivers 230 gigaflops of performance and is augmented with OpenGL performance from the RSX. The Cell and the RSX are coupled directly with a high-speed FlexIO bus with shared access to memory, giving the appearance of a single large virtual processor.

The BCU-100 is available with a complete visualization solution from Side Effects Software. Tools are included for modeling, lighting, advanced physical simulations, particle effects, compositing and rendering. Support is also provided for the mental ray renderer from mental images, which includes support for the MetaSL shading language.

The de facto operating system for the appliance is Yellow Dog Linux, provided by Terra Soft Solutions Inc., who teamed up with Sony on the BCU-100 introduction. “We initiated our collaborative effort with Sony and the BCU-100 one year ago, moving to build a thoroughly tested, easily installed, scalable and robust version of Yellow Dog Linux for Sony’s high-end customers,” said Terra Soft CEO Kai Staats. “The ‘Enterprise’ extension bundles our OS with an annual, per motherboard license for support, granting BCU-100 owners confidence in their ability to gain the OS-level support they require.”

Terra Soft is also providing Y-HPC, a cluster construction suite. For those BCU-100 owners who seek to install an identical node image across a half dozen or even hundreds of BCU-100 compute nodes, Y-HPC provides a means for node image deployment. “A simple tool in concept, Y-HPC enables systems administrators to rapidly deploy homogeneous node images with render engines, load balancing image data, and Moab cluster workload management hooks pre-configured,” said Staats.

The BCU-100 also uses Terra Soft’s Y-Film, a productivity suite for visual effects production. Y-Film was developed by Scott Frankel, formerly of Industrial Light & Magic and then ESC Entertainment, where he was the digital effects supervisor for the last two Matrix films. Y-Film streamlines the production of computer graphics imaging from Windows, OS X, and Linux desktops to a Linux render farm, which in this case is made up of BCU-100 compute nodes. The suite provides an automated workflow pipeline and an integrated asset management system built upon a scalable SQL database for model, animation, camera, composite, and shot tracking and reporting.

“To paint a proper picture, take one hundred or more artists working on a film, each manipulating hundreds of frames, each frame set undergoing its third, tenth, … thirtieth iteration at the request of the art director, day after day, week after week.” said Staats. “The render farm is slammed and the myriad of variables overwhelming. Something has to track the massive quantity of assets, something has to maintain order amidst impending chaos. This is what Y-Film does. It brings order out of chaos.”

The BCU-100 is aimed at CG studios and artists looking for a lot of rendering performance in a compact space. But according to Sony, the machine could also be adapted for general HPC workloads. “The BCU-100 is ideal for visualization and rendering pipelines and any stream-intensive processing,” said Satoshi Kanemura, Sony’s vice president, B2B of America. “This includes not only the film and entertainment industry but also scientific visualization, medical, defense, oil and gas exploration, and additional high-performance computing applications.”

In theory this is true, since the system is basically a Linux OS on top of a Cell processor. But the custom RSX GPU chip will probably only be of use to graphics codes employing OpenGL (which is a shame — the RSX has 1.8 teraflops of single-precision performance). Since the RSX is based on NVIDIA’s 7-series technology, it’s doubtful if CUDA would ever support it.

The BCU-100’s true calling seems to be as a turnkey appliance for digital content creators. According to Sony, the BCU-100 can scale from small setups for CG artists at boutique studios to large rendering farms for the top-tier studios. Its small size and performance/watt efficiency is an advantage in both settings.

Product availability is slated for later in the year, and Sony has been testing the waters with as yet unnamed parties. “We have been quietly working with a few facilities with plans to begin customer evaluations just after SIGGRAPH,” said Kanemura. Pricing has not been disclosed.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire