DreamWorks Animation is a globally renowned company that has created many great animation franchises. Each year, it sets new ambitious goals for itself and needs high performance computing to achieve them.
DreamWorks Animation data center is 22 years old. Last year the company faced a lack of free space and power supply. She was looking for a technological solution that would increase productivity without major modernization of the premises.
« , , , — (Skottie Miller), - DreamWorks Animation. — Lenovo, , ».
With the Neptune Liquid Cooling system and Lenovo's high-performance computing cluster, DreamWorks Animation has more than 100 times increased the amount of energy consumed per square foot of the data center.
Skottie Miller, technical consultant and VP of Platforms and Infrastructure, DreamWorks Animation.
Lenovo experts immediately expressed their readiness to support the project at all stages: from preparing the equipment for installation to fine-tuning - all with the opportunity to exchange experience and conduct experiments together.
“The key to our partnership is to become a living laboratory for Lenovo engineers, a platform for innovations that they wanted to test on real customers,” said Miller.
The changes helped artists improve their workflow and get a quick response when they come up with new worlds. DreamWorks Animation's renderer, MoonRay, is scalable and uses the power of cores across multiple machines. And this opens up more opportunities.
Scott Chapin, director of large systems design, DreamWorks Animation
"Imagine objects being created in real time in front of your eyes, which usually take minutes or even hours to render," comments Scott Chapin, director of systems engineering at DreamWorks Animation.
Lenovo, along with DreamWorks managers, workers and contractors who built the data center, brought their vision of the future to life. “We always manage the suppliers ourselves, so we can choose those who will provide more performance solutions at a lower cost,” explains Jerrod Buterbaugh, Senior Consultant Engineer, Power and Cooling Services, Lenovo Data Center.
The Lenovo team oversaw every step, from designing the path for water to enter the new cooling coil, to implementing the plan and implementing additions to the building management system. Buterbo was involved in all processes, including the installation of earthquake-resistant equipment, system tuning and control over the water purification process. He has been a plumber, an electrician, a contractor, and an engineer.
Balaji Alahari, Storage Operations Manager, DreamWorks Animation
« Lenovo . , , — (Balaji Alahari), DreamWorks Animation. — , ».
Unfortunately, not everything went according to plan. For example, the installation team unexpectedly changed the layout of the liquid cooling hoses relative to the racks. A Lenovo specialist had to promptly correct the orientation of the tubes in the heat exchanger. However, this did not affect the deadline for the project.
The pandemic also added problems. Lenovo had to limit the presence of specialists in the data center, but to avoid downtime, the company looked for new solutions. For example, after finding software problems, engineers figured out how to replace power supplies while the HPC cluster was running.
Within a week after the system was connected, the necessary tasks were performed. On the DreamWorks render farm, it was seen that the performance of the cluster with the Neptune system increased by 20% compared to air-cooled servers - in part because the liquid cooling mitigated throttling when overheated.
“The ability to get about 42 kilowatts per rack in a 22-year-old data center is something we didn't expect,” said Alahari.
The system has literally passed the test of fire. In September, a local fire caused a short outage of the data center. When everything worked, the team found that none of the new HPC servers crashed.
Finally, Miller gave advice to companies considering switching to a liquid cooling system:
« . -, - - . , . Lenovo».