Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/147928
GreenButton Pushes Cloud Solutions Forward For 25 years, Pixar has been offering the benefits of its celebrated RenderMan renderer. Recently, though, Pixar has extended the powerful technology with RenderMan On Demand, an online rendering service for Pixar's RenderMan. RenderMan On Demand offers immediate access to the power of the clouds' vastly scalable computing resources without the expense of building and running an in-house renderfarm. Ren- users of Chaos Group's V-Ray, Autodesk's 3ds Max, and Blender, as well as a host of other companies outside of the computer graphics industry. GreenButton's roots, though, are in the CG space, as its founder, Scott Houston, worked with Director Peter Jackson on The Lord of the Rings, to enable Jackson and his crew to deliver a complex scene containing thousands of digital characters that were rendered individually. Houston built the derMan On Demand is accessible directly through a service interface developed and administrated by GreenButton, a provider of a low-cost, cloud-based platform for compute-intensive applications. GreenButton, a provider of computeintensive and integrated on-demand cloud solutions, also handles similar service for data center that could support those four minutes of remarkable footage, and after the movie, the data center was repurposed to accommodate cloud rendering for others and, eventually, IT cloud-based services. In a nutshell, GreenButton services those who need computer power but do not need the infrastructure. "There is an insatiable thirst for computing power, and it is no longer economical or prudent to serve this through investment of on-premise hardware when the demand for that resource is spikey in nature – resulting in underutilization and idle cycles," says Dave Fellows, CTO of GreenButton. "There is also significant time, cost, and human resource required to provision and maintain on-premise environments. Solutions such as GreenButton, which enable access to tens of thousands of cores all at the push of a (green) button, are transformational and incredibly enabling for all organizations." GreenButton's Cloud Fabric platform is geared for small, medium, and large businesses across a broad set of industries. "Whether it's for running risk analysis for a financial services firm or for rendering an animation sequence, our Cloud Fabric platform allows these workloads to be cloud-enabled in a matter of hours using our SDK and then to run across different cloud environments seamlessly with a rich and visual management tool that provides all the controls our varied customers need," Fellows says. Graphics Chips Q1 Market Results Vary Jon Peddie Research (JPR) revealed the estimated graphics chip shipments and suppliers' market share for Q1 2013, and the news was disappointing for Intel but encouraging for Nvidia and for AMD on the desktop. Quarter to quarter, AMD lost 0.3%, Intel slipped 5.3%, and Nvidia increased 3.6%. The overall PC market declined 13.7% quarter to quarter, while the graphics market only declined 3.2%, reflecting an interest on the part of consumers for double-attach – the adding of a discrete GPU to a system with integrated processor graphics. On a year-to-year basis, JPR found that total graphics shipments during Q1 '13 dropped 12.9%, similar to PC shipments, which declined by 12.6% overall. GPUs are traditionally a leading indicator of the market, since a GPU goes into every system, and most of the PC vendors are guiding down to flat for Q2 '13. The popularity of tablets and the persistent economic malaise are the most often mentioned reasons for the altered nature of the PC market. Nonetheless, the CAGR for PC graphics from 2012 to 2016 is 2.6%, and JPR expects the total shipments of graphics chips in 2016 to be 394 million units. The 10-year average change for graphics shipments for quarter to quarter is a growth of -2.2%. This quarter is below the average, with a 3.2% decrease. The findings include discrete and integrated graphics (CPU and chipset) for desktops, notebooks, and netbooks, and PCbased commercial and industrial/scientific and embedded. In summary, the graphics market decreased year to year for the quarter. Shipments were down 15.8 million units from this quarter last year. CG W July / August 2013 ■ 5