Avere Systems keeps CGI specialists Framestore rolling

Framestore CTO Stephen MacPherson tells Computing how Avere storage filers keeps the visual effects studio running

Award-winning visual effects studio Framestore is responsible for CGI in hit films including Warhorse and Skyfall, as well as upcoming sci-fi movie Gravity. With more than 600 employees spread across five offices in London and North America, it's important for Framestore's servers to be at the cutting edge in order to support the creation of advanced special effects for Hollywood blockbusters.

Framestore uses FXT4500 Edge storage filers from Avere Systems to provide the studio with the massive rendering and storage performance capabilities required to create impressive digital images. Spinning racks allow staff to more quickly read and write to the most accessed files.

Before installing Avere storage systems, the studio was starting to struggle with basics such as identifying hot files, and dealing with rogue renders which had the effect of slowing down systems when they were most needed, as Framestore CTO Stephen MacPherson explained to Computing.

"The main complication we noticed was that whenever we hit the end of production, there was a classic line we'd get from our artists: ‘why is it that things always get slow towards the end when we need it the most?'" he said.

The sophisticated CG imagery created by Framestore requires massive computer resources, and with large numbers of staff working on it simultaneously the render farms (the high-performance computer clusters used to create visual effects for movies) were under huge pressure. In order to make the system more efficient, it was necessary to to separate these render farms from the rest of Framestore's infrastructure.

"What we wanted was a solution to partition off the render farm so all that render access would allow all the users to come into the mass storage. So it would act as a buffer between the render farm and the mass storage," said MacPherson, explaining how Avere has become essential for the studio's operations.

"So that was the problem and what exactly we ended up doing - we scaled up. At our maximum we had 15,000 cores hammering on the farm and without Avere the storage would have absolutely collapsed."

The benefits of Avere - which MacPherson credits with a great understanding of exactly what Framestore required - have already been seen in the production of Gravity, an upcoming space drama starring George Clooney and Sandra Bullock.

"We knew that there was so much CG that was going to be required, and we knew from our calculations based on the complexity of the frames, the length of the shots and the level of detail that the film required, we knew the rendering was going to be deep, wide and long, so we knew that we were going to be hitting a wall," said MacPherson.

But the solution provided by Avere meant the studio was able to work on the cutting-edge special effects for Gravity without struggling systems negatively impacting on output or efficiency.

"It isolated the render farm for the users, so that way the users are continuing working as normal, meanwhile we were rendering 15,000 cores, so that was the big gain."

Away from the glamour of feature films, Framestore is also using Avere Systems extensively in the infrastructure of its new Canadian offices. Much of it is based around 4TB drives that are used to create accurate simulations for visuals, for example, the way water moves around an underwater James Bond in the opening sequence of Skyfall. Such effects require the rendering of a large amount of data.

"We've just opened up a facility in Montreal and we're revisiting how we architect our storage. One of the big advantages is that we're awash with data," MacPherson said. "We do simulations. A simulation will create 1TB of data - just for one simulation. We need to have that kind of depth. The 4TB drives give us depth."

The company's Canadian office is also using Avere System's solution in a new way, alongside ZFS, a combined file system and logical volume manager, essentially making Avere the core supplier for much of Framestore's systems.

"With Avere we're exploring a different alternative where we have these big storage tanks behind these 4TB drive configurations. It's all running with ZFS with all the benefits such as the snapshotting and professional file system tools that we depend upon," said MacPherson.

"Then we're putting Avere in front of that storage, but this time, we're putting it in front of it for the entire facility. So it's now become part of our front line. Rather than being a special purpose [solution] for the rendering, we're actually using Avere servers as our front-end servers."