Flame hardware question

[Anonymous]

Hi,

I am currently researching hardware for upgrading our Flame 2013/2014 system. The purchase will happen in late May.

Several questions for anyone that has an opinion.

1) Is there an advantage to using a 2nd GPU acceleration card like the Nvidia K20. Can Flame even utilize these cores?  Or is it better to just go for a K5000 or K6000 card? At the moment I'm looking at an HP820 with 64GB RAM.

2) Because of the advancement of the GPU cards does the CPU matter as much now?  Should I be getting the fastest CPU I can afford and not get the faster graphics card?

3) I also need to replace our EOL Stone. Are people still purchase RAID hardware from Autodesk and the premium price?  Are there 3rd party local RAID solutions I should be looking at?

Hoping to get a complete system (hardware) for under $30K if possible.

Thanks for any suggestions or ideas on this topic. I'll be meeting with my Autodesk Rep next week but thought I should try getting some of this info before then.

Thanks.

-Cablet

[lustrecolorist]

1) No, at this point, Flame only addresses a single, primary GPU.  The best options right now are a Q6000, or if you have the budget a K6000.  The K5000 is a nice card, but I don't believe it's officially supported.

2) A large GPU is very helpful, but a lot of calulations are still handled by the CPU.  Flame and Lustre both benefit quite a bit from clock speed, so get the fastest CPUs you can, over 3.0GHz if possible, and prioritize that over getting a larger number cores. In my experience it's better to have a 3.2Ghz 8-Core, than a 2.4Ghz 12-Core.

3) Most of the Autodesk arrays I've seen have been based on a Xyratex Fibre or a Dot Hill SAS chassis, but I've used LSI SAS Raid controllers with off-the-shelf 6Gb SAS enclosures with no problem.  It depends a bit on what you're doing.  If you're comping with lots of layers, 10K SAS drives with fast seek times (or SSDs) will help you  maintain real time playback and give you fast renders.  If you're onlining or grading, especially from compressed codecs like ProRes or DNxHD, you can get away with as few as eight 7.2K drives without a problem.

[Anonymous]

Technically, you need to buy your hardware for Flame from an Autodesk reseller. Flame & Flame Premium are both Turnkey systems and the DKU (Discreet Kernel Utility) only supports certain Hardware configurations. You could try to set up your own custom hardware but Autodesk won't support it and you may have issues getting it to work.

[Robert.Adam]

Hi Cablet.

Regarding your dual graphics card question:

We have just announced that Flame 2015 now supports a second NVIDIA K6000 (on HP z820 workstations) or NVIDIA Quadro 6000 (on z820 or z800) graphics card, that will be used by the "Background Reactor" feature that allows you to send your shot, sequence, or batch setup to the second GPU for rendering while continuing to work interactively on certain other tasks in the foreground.

http://area.autodesk.com/assets/img/events/nab2014/2014-04-07_Flame2015.pdf

Regards,

Robert.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the info. The idea of having two K6000 cards is ideal for our artist.

It is disheartening however to have Autodesk tell me I must purchase through them. The system I spec'd out is identical to the one they want to sell me. Z820, 64GB RAM, K6000 x2, dual 3.4Ghz 8 core.  I'd still order the other items from them (AJA, SDI daughter card, etc). Autodesk want's 50% more than we get from HP. Our company orders at least 4 or 5 HP Z820's a month for our Nuke artists so we get a decent deal.

The storage I should certainly purchase from Autodesk for the support though.

Thanks for the feedback.