DreamWorks Pictures, a major motion picture studio, ran all of its considerable computing resources at full tilt speed to create “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” the third in the series, which was nominated for an Academy Award, Golden Globe and Critics Choice for Animated Feature Film, though in all cases losing to “Pinocchio.” But why bring that up?
Although animation, fiction and the creation of talking, sword-wielding felines may be considered idle pursuit by pragmatic engineers (is there any other kind?), the demands that modern movie production place on computers lead to an improvement in processing power and graphics that will benefit engineering applications. Just as sending men to the moon—which may well have been considered idle pursuit by moviemakers—led to the advancement of technology and discovery (fuel cells, for example), so has the movie industry advanced computer technology (faster graphics, storage and processing).
The rendering of scenes, fur, furniture, leaves on trees, the sun’s illumination through the windows, shadows … all that takes a tremendous amount of computing resources. Whereas a product engineer may choose to render one perspective of an assembly for marketing purposes, an animated film is 24 rendered scenes per second. “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish” at 1:40 running time means 144,000 frames rendered.
The rendering effort alone requires near supercomputing at every level—from the animators’ desktops crowded with both UNIX and Windows workstations and in rooms filled with metal cabinets inside of which racks hold servers the size of extra-large pizza boxes from floor to ceiling.
We are given a tour through the server room “but no pictures, please.”
We get it. DreamWorks has a lot of intellectual property that is vulnerable to the prying eyes of other filmmakers.
Here servers hum away around the clock. Full speed is not fast enough. DreamWorks tweaks the servers to run faster, a practice called overclocking, which generates so much heat that forced air cannot take it away, so they are water-cooled. More on that later.
So great is the demand, every cycle so sought after, that load balancing must be ruthless.
“Our system detects if a user is idle, logs them out and turns over the resources to another user,” says the system administrator.
Cool It
We are allowed to take pictures of the water-cooling system manifold.
The idea of having water in a server room raises a lot of eyebrows. DreamWorks answers the unasked question.
“Water has better flow and heat transfer than heat exchanger fluids,” they say.
Fluid quick disconnects in the back of the server allow the server to be pulled or inserted from the front of the cabinet without spilling a drop. This is the trademarked Lenovo Neptune technology.
Water-cooling may be unique to Lenovo, but liquid cooling is not. High-end gaming systems use liquid cooling proudly—as Harley Davidson riders brag about the noise of their choppers, another negative turned positive. The high freezing point of water could be considered its liability, but here we are in Southern California. Freezing was not in the forecast.
Until it was. Our tour of DreamWorks takes place during a record-setting cold. Snow covers the peaks of the mountains to the west of Los Angeles, visible from the bus taking us to the studio.
Lenovo
DreamWorks relies on Lenovo for all its computing, whether local or in the server room.
We see one of the servers laid bare—its copper cooling channels that ferry heat from CPUs, GPUs and RAM. A gray plastic of some sort presses against the RAM, simultaneously a thermal conductor and electrical insulator. Only the power supply is air-cooled and Lenovo is “working on that.”
The liquid cooling was necessary for all the power dissipated by each server running a full tilt, says the DreamWorks representative.
“We used to have 10 KW per rack. With water-cooling, we can handle over 60 KW per rack.”
Lenovo is reminded of its last computing vendor. That it was HP is not mentioned to be polite to our hosts. But it is apparent that the bond established between Lenovo and DreamWorks is far more special.
“Lenovo saw us through the pandemic,” says Kate Swanborg, Technology Communications and Strategic Alliances Executive at DreamWorks.
“It was Thursday morning,” recounts a DreamWorks IT administrator. “We were told to go home right now. We grabbed our laptops and took off. But 4 hours later, we were up and running. We were tapping into the computers at our campus remotely. Lenovo did that—made sure we could work from anywhere.”
What’s preventing DreamWorks from doing even more compute-intensive media, like VR, asks one of the assembled media.
“Well, it’s not the technology. Lenovo has the best technology,” says Swanborg with an affection not normally seen between computer company and customer.
Rob Herman, GM of Lenovo’s workstation group, can’t help beaming at the compliment.
“DreamWorks is a passionate company,” she adds. “Lenovo matches us.”