revuprender

check out this press release here: http://pressroom.nvidia.com/easyir/customrel.do?easyirid=A0D622CE9F579F09&version=live&releasejsp=release_157&prid=686140 It clearly states that RealityServer is available, however I have dug deeper and while there are what they call mental cloud AMIs on EC2 and they have been on there for a long time from what I was told...There currently is no AMIs available for RealityServer that can use the GPU clusters. This is an issue that Amazon has to work out since they have not set up there Dev Pay system to work with HPC yet. Once they do this then developers will be able to load their software on for use and get paid a small hourly fee for its use. This is wonderful because then no one has to go out and deal with buying something like RealityServer because it is expensive. In fact I spoke with some of the managers in charge of all of EC2 and they want to setup a much more extensive system then just their current dev pay system they have setup for non HPC. They want to make it more flexible for developers and end-users. However we will be using EC2 and their GPUs for our exhibit booth demos at Autodesk University to run our RevUp RealityServer software for rendering with Revit. The way we are able to do this is by loading RealityServer ourselves with a private license for it and thus creating our own custom AMI. Yes exactly Andrew, it is a breath of fresh air versus all the other GPU offerings. Even though other companies have GPUs available on the cloud, no one else is set up such a nice system like Amazon. Talking to the Amazon folks is nice because they clearly state that they do not think like a regular hosting company. There main goal is just to be able to enable as many people as possible to use the servers they have setup and to make it as affordable as possible.

Amazon has set this up for anyone to be able to use it. What more do you want them to do? They have built millions and millions of dollars worth of equipment and have a system that allows anyone to access it for only $2.10/hour as little or as much as they want. I do not see how they could possibly make it any more affordable without giving it away for free. Right now you can go and fire up computer clusters with GPU's and then load any software to run on top of it, you can run any kind of parallels GPU compute software. Here are the specs here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/hpc-applications/ The HPC instances are totally different then the regular instances on EC2. Traditional HPC supercomputing must have two things: 1.) high end GPU, RAM, and possible GPUs now and 2. Fast Ethernet connections for clustering. As you can see both of these are there. This announcement is a huge step forward in supercomputing for the masses and I can state that it will not be long until GPU rendering software is made available with custom AMI instances that can be used by anyone.

Ratnakar, I am also confused as to why you think Amazon announcing GPUs now available for use on their EC2 service makes me unaware of the complexity of GPU computing? For the last two days I have spent time in discussions with the Amazon EC2 folks and they are very helpful and accommodating and in fact RevUp Render's GPU based product will now be "Powered by Amazon AWS." Jeff Mottle asked me what I knew about this new offering last night and I am the one who told him that there are automatically 8 GPUs available by default that anyone can go and spin up Amazon AMIs of. You can easily fill out form if you have a good use case reason to request more than 8 GPUs, but honestly 8 Telsa 2050 "Fermi" GPUs is a lot of power for rendering. I knew that Amazon was going to be putting GPUs into their public cloud but I just did not know it would be so soon. It is a great thing that they have done this as it will now make GPU supercomputing available to anyone who wants to use it on the fly without spending much at all.

They do not have to learn any new extra knowledge. Part of the technology we have created is for the Revit materials to be converted automatically to compatible RealityServer and iRay materials. This was maybe one of the most challenging parts of what we have accomplished. As you can see from the examples I posted that the RevUp RealityServer rendering looks much better then the rendering that was done directly inside of Revit.

Hello Francisco, sorry I can't release the model of that project because it was actually a real project I worked on for architect Peter Chermayeff and he would not want me to do that. I am familiar with the Revit to FBX to 3DS Max workflow since I have used it many times myself. However it is not a simple workflow and certainly not seamless since there is a lot of setup needed in Max once you bring your Revit model in. The technology we have created is a very seamless workflow from Revit to RealityServer and it is actually just as easy as clicking a menu button. Andrew also said that the solution I have makes sense for some people because most architects do not own 3DS Max and more importantly do not know how to use it.

Andrew, I hear what you are saying. The settings in Revit are nothing like Max and it is very normal to spend 10 hours or more rendering one single still image of an interior with a lot of lights. Right now I do not have any Max models that I can show since we have focused on this workflow for Revit. Hopefully we will be able to do some nice tests with Jeff and John from Renderstream. When I said 16 cores I was referring to logical cores. Each CPU has 8 threaded cores so 2 CPU's is 16 cores. Depends which way you want to look at it. For example BOXX often says they have 24 core systems with two Xeon 6-core CPU's since each core is hyper-threaded. If I look in the device manager on that system then I will actually see 16 processors listed. I can send a screen shot if you would like to see.

Thanks Andrew for your response. I feel that you guys now understand what I am trying to do with this technology. I think it was just misunderstood at first because RealitServer is meant to be used for final productions and this application certainly can be used like that. However our first goal is just to get a single still frame rendering out of Revit very fast and this has accomplished that. As you said there is no extra setup and it is really the same as just hitting render inside Revit. I am attaching two renderings. The first renderings was done directly inside of Revit 2011 64bit using mental ray. Revit 2011 does take advantage of all the CPU cores so there is no limitation there and this was done on a dual socket Xeon X5550 2.66Ghz system with 24GB of RAM (that is a total of 16 CPU Nehalem cores! This first image showing the bridge took over 6 hours and 19 minutes to render inside of Revit. The last image rendered almost instantly with RevUp RealityServer on just (2) GTX 480 GPU's. Then it took about 2 minutes to finish rendering to this quality. Imagine how much better the performance is when using several Tesla Fermi cards on the cloud. :-) I know these are not the stats you wanted originally but now that you understand exactly what our goals are right now then you can easily see the very valuable use for this.

Thank you taking the time to listen to what I am really trying to do and understanding that there is value to it. I would not have spent over two years of my life working on this startup company if I felt that there was not a huge value to this. RevUp RealityServer is just part of the solution. I did not mention this before but the first thing RevUp Render came up with is a Cloud Workstation. Now please consider this because the solution is simple but it is two products together that create a really BIG solution. The designer does all of their modeling, design work and everything except rendering on the RevUp VCS (cloud workstation) which you can see the kind of hardware being used on the website but it is very high end server hardware. When the user wants to render they simply send the model data out to RevUp RealityServer. The reason this is such a beautiful combination is because none of the workstation resources are being used and the designer can keep working with no slow down in performance. There are many benefits to this solution but one is that it can provide designers from anywhere in world access to a workstation with hardware that they might be able to get access to normally. We use special remote connection technology so the end-user has a "like local experience." One thing that drives me crazy is seeing architects, designers etc.. with workstations sitting next to them on their desk with a 1400 watt power working very long hours. There is proven research now and case studies of exposure to this kind of equipment at close range is very dangerous for your health. There was a school in California with poor wiring, powerful WiFi, and other items that were leaking out EMF's like crazy. The teachers and young students started getting cancer at a rate that was shocking. Europe is always way ahead of the United States with this kind of stuff and they are taking WiFi out of most public places. I myself have WiFi running right now in my home, but I try to remember to disable it when I am not using it. That is just one reason I am a big believer in moving high end graphical workstations into the cloud. Other reasons are many but some are that the end user never has to worry about hardware failure since load balancing can move them to another server. The end-user also does not have to worry about upgrading since they always will be using the best hardware. This solution might not make sense to some of you if already have high end equipment right now. For architects though who are sharing BIM models across multiple locations it makes a lot of sense. Instead of creating a problem and then trying to fix it with a band-aid, why not just not create that problem in the first place? A lot of A+E firms are taking their BIM model and sharing it across multiple office locations and then using bandwidth accelerators that are very expensive and only work so well to synchronize the model. Instead I believe they should just not create that problem and use the most simple and logical solution which is to keep the BIM model in the same central location and have cloud workstations that the remote users log into. If you are sharing BIM models then this solution makes a lot of sense to you. I could keep going on but I just wanted to express this because this thread is about hardware and this applies even more than the GPU rendering stuff we are doing. We have been talking mostly about software and how it runs on the hardware.

It looks like that is just taking the Revit model out and into Max and rendering with vRay. What is so special about that? What we have come up with is a workflow for RealityServer to run directly on top or side by side with Revit. This means you move the Revit model and it updates automatically inside the RevUp RealityServer window instantly. Again most architects do not own 3DS Max or know how to use it to make animations. With our product they do not have to buy any new software. There is also no having to re-set up the scene like you have to when going from Revit to Max. When people see the way this product works at AU, they will definitely want to use it and see a huge benefit with it.

"i m not making a system of six xeons.. it was of four opteron each one at a cost of $300... less than 1/10 of a decent quadro.... GPU rendering does look promising" I think you might have the numbers off a bit. You can get a GTX 480 card for about $400 and a Quadro 4000 FERMI card for about $800. No doubt four Opteron's would be a beefy system.

Ratnakar, Let me explain a bit about my background and why I got involved in all of this. My background is in architectural design and I was working on projects with very complex geometry inside Revit and when we would hit the render button it would freeze and never get past 10% completion. Around that time I started to realize how big of a gap there was in the AEC industry and other industries when it came to technology. My goal is to remove the creative disconnect between what a designer actually thinks of in their mind and what ends up designed on the computer screen or even built. Currently there is a huge disconnect there and we want to bridge that gap. Over two years ago I started looking at ways to speed up the rendering directly inside of Revit because most architects I worked with did not use 3DS Max and I just felt like the Revit rendering capabilities were not feasible at all. I started to look at what the gaming industry was doing and then I think the only GPU rendering engine even available was Gelato http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelato_(software) which some of you may remember was a project that Nvidia made. I think Nvidia took the entire team that made Galato and moved them over to make what became CUDA. Basically I felt at the time that if we could make a GPU rendering engine for Revit then it would help architects to be able to render walkthrough animations. Look at this animation here I made in Revit about six months ago: this took about two weeks to render these two simple animations I was using a system with (2) Intel Xeon X5550 Nehalem CPU's and 24GB of RAM. I am showing this example to help show how unpractical it is to render animations inside Revit. The frames for this animation was not good quality but it still took this long for 1200 frames. Most architects just give up trying to render walkthroughs in Revit because it takes too long and this is supposed to be an important part of the design process to walk the client through the unbuilt project. Before iRay was launched with the GPU version and RealityServer 3.0 I was working with some programmers to see if we could make our own GPU rendering engine. However then I saw iRay coming out and figured it would take us years to come up with a GPU renderer that could do the same. It is really crazy now that when I started down this path that there was really just that one GPU rendering engine Gelato that I could find and now they are popping up left and right from everywhere. Well so I started talking to Mental Images because I knew we could take advantage of their technology faster then we could make our own from scratch. Now it has been over a year of development and we will finally be launching a product at Autodesk University which will enable architects to take the entire Revit model out into RealityServer and render it in seconds/minutes whereas it would take hours/days inside Revit. While RealityServer was built to be a production display tool we are quickly turning it into a very powerful collaborative design and design review tool.

Hi Travis, I should point out that RealityServer uses iRay for its GPU rendering engine. RealityServer also has CPU rendering mode and a generic GPU rendering mode as well. RealityServer itself is not the rendering engine, think of it more of a platform. It does web services for cloud computing among many other functions. Besides being a web services platform RealityServer also has some advanced clustering tools so it can cluster together GPU's across many servers and it does this through the ethernet connection. I do not think they have plans to sell RealityServer to the average end-user since it is a big platform that typically large hosting companies will purchase and run on their servers as a service. I hope that helps you understand this technology a little more.

Also, right now while I am not using my personal workstation much right now the GTC 480 I have in there is crunching away on Folding Home with an advanced GPU version and folding proteins for cancer research about 10x faster then I could with my i7 CPU that is also in this system. I have used both and the GPU one goes through jobs of 50,000 units in just a few hours while I think it would used to take days to do the same.

Just a quick response for right now but something I thought of is a program I downloaded and played around with a couple of months ago. It is called design garage from nVidia. Some of you may know of it already but if you have a capable GPU then you can down it and see some amazing results very fast. Here is a forum post with some results to show: http://www.evga.com/forums/tm.aspx?m=289470&mpage=1 Of course these are not specific architectural scenes but like I said, this technology always comes from entertainment industry and then gets to use last. However there are some renders here with very detailed architectural scenes as back drops. I used Design Garage with (2) GTX 480 fermi GPU's and I was able to get very fast almost real-time photorealistic results. The other reason I mention this is because RealityServer functions very similar to this software. mental images had a demo of a car at GTC at their booth with a scene around it and the whole thing was actually rendering almost instantly on many GPU's and it was the same high quality as the examples on this link. When I referred to amazing things being done with the GPU that I saw at GTC I was not referring to the 3DS iRay technology demo but I was just talking about all the amazing things being done that I saw there overall...from medical research to video games. All doing things that would simply not be possible on the CPU and there is no way you can argue that if you know of the things I am referring to.

Mr Rats, This discussion started because you were talking about building some kind of six processor type server for rendering. I suggested that you might want to just wait until you can see what is coming out with GPU technology until you spend a lot of money on a system with six XEON processors. I think the type of system you were thinking about buying or did buy is way more unpractical than what I am talking about. I said a GPU can be 1000x faster than the CPU and what I meant is that it can be for some applications. Rendering happens to be one of the applications that runs very well on a GPU and that is all I was trying to say to you and AJLynn. Over the last two years I have been working with a lot of very talented 3D Programming who specialize in making software run on the GPU and I have seen some really interesting things. If you went to NVIDIA GTC then you would not be arguing with me because you would have seen all the amazing things being done with the GPU and CUDA and not just rendering. Something like a database might not be an application that can run very well on the GPU. Yes I was not throwing out an exact figure as I was being general but there are cases where GPU's are just simply many many X's faster then the CPU for rendering.... http://www.ixbt.com/video3/images/cuda/gflops.png Take a look at this chart which does not even show the latest cards and stops in 2008. You can see roughly that the GPU is actually almost 10x faster in achieving peak GFLOP/S. Of course it is not always that much faster but I was referring to the general technology. I am sure AJLynn will try to tear about this statement too. I am here just trying to give you guys some knowledge from my experience with working with GPU's. You could be a little kinder since I am spending my time trying to help and answer your questions the best I can right now. Honestly though the responses you have been giving me makes me really not want to spend much more time going back and forth with you. Some of the statements you are making: "mr. revup.. please tel ur nvidia guys.. to make a new system... where the CPU is replaced by there CUDA GPU.. n the MB chipset can feed it with the required ram." This statement just shows how unfamiliar you are with this technology. iRay does use CUDA, it is based off of CUDA. Again mentalray has been out for over 20 years and iRay for just one year. I am sure they are working on the features you are talking about such as instancing. As we stated we are going to do some tests in the near future. When we will do these and have the results to post I cannot say but you will just have to wait till then. As AJLynn stated it really just is not productive for me to keep responding. It is not anything about an ego but rather I have just been trying to respond with what knowledge I know right now.