Supercomputers are super.
Ted Schilowitz has been an industry mover and shaker for a very long time. He was part of the creative force behind AJA, G-Tech and RED Digital Cinema, to name a few of his career highlights. Within the past year he has assumed several new titles including Futurist at 20th Century Fox Studios, CinemaVangelist for Barco, and President of Silverdraft, a company that provides the power of supercomputing technology to post-production applications in the entertainment industry. We caught up with him at NAB 2014 and wound up with a string of video interviews.
In the first segment, Ted describes the Devil and Demon Strategy from SilverDraft. Devil is a relatively compact 400-core supercomputer small enough not to require a dedicated server room. Demon is its little brother, functioning as a stand-alone desk-side workstation. Multiple Demon units can connect with a Devil for multi-layered network rendering. Pricing for a Demon begins around $5,000 depending on the configuration.
In a small footprint, the SilverDraft Compact Devil can deliver more than 400 cores of computing power without requiring a dedicated server room, dedicated power runs, or a specialized environment. The Devil can live in a creative office environment as a high-powered artist suite, or connect as needed to multiple Demon visual computing workstations to supercharge your workflow without bottlenecks in data transfer, IO or processing.
Above: a compact Devil, with 26 CPU’s, 424 cores and almost a terabyte of RAM (896 GB).
A single Devil supercomputer can act as your server, render farm and workstation, providing you ample power during the day, and solid rendering at night. Just a few artists can produce a much higher volume of shots without the hassle or expense of a traditional setup, and without the power and cooling necessary for those systems. Imagine a system that can run multiple seats of 3D software like Maya or Max, and compositing systems like Nuke or After Effects, all in one box that simply plugs into the wall, giving you the power of a larger facility.
On the next page: Inside the SilverDraft Devil’s Playground.
