Name
Practical HPC Technologies for File-Based Production and Transcoding of UHD-1/2
Date & Time
Tuesday, November 10, 2020, 9:30 PM - 10:00 PM
Timezone
UTC
Raji Krishnaswami Reona Yanagishita
Description
The premise of IP in broadcast is that it finally merges the worlds of broadcast, networking, and IT. SMPTE-2110 and it's related standards are solving the difficult task of the reliable transport, synchronization, redundancy and monitoring of video-over-IP. Meanwhile, rising framerates, color spaces and resolution present a separate challenge in the realm of file-based workflows, that may only be satisfied by Moore, Nielsen and Metcalfe’s Laws. Increasingly, High-Performance Computing (HPC) technologies are beginning to be adopted, adapted and integrated into the world of broadcast IT, in particular when facing UHD-2 workflows.

Information Technologies, in particular HPC technologies, move at a fast pace; the goal of this paper is to update readers on developments finding themselves into the Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) data center. We will try to avoid buzzwords and marketing-speak while focusing on real-world implications of file-based workflows and distribution beyond 2020, with an eye towards helping you plan your facilities today towards this near future. By comparing and contrasting Media and Entertainment workflows with typically computationally intense HPC workloads, we plan to discuss technologies such as Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), composable architectures, Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE), Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA), and other technologies from the HPC world that are already turning up in the products and purchase plans of TV and Film Production.

It is widespread consumer demand that will spawn production and distribution of High Resolution/High Framerate (HFR)/High-Dynamic Range (HDR) video content. In East Asia (Japan, Korea and Greater China) there are complete manufacturing ecosystems including camera, lenses, distribution and consumption. With the Olympic games in 2021 and 2022, 8K-capable sets reaching the price of a month's rent, and on average, much lower average viewing distances to the screen, conditions are set favorably in the consumer market. With the majority of the world’s population, it is fair to assume an increase in 4K/8K-capable sets with a corresponding demand for high resolution and wide-gamut content.

How to ingest and edit such footage? Store and forward it? Encode to various distribution formats? At such high data-rates, significant advances in broadcast IT infrastructure will be required to adhere to traditional intraday deadlines and workflows. To accomplish these tasks, versus turnkey solutions, we will increasingly look to the HPC datacenter to increase performance and scale to the turnaround times we are accustomed to from Standard and High Definition productions.
Technical Depth of Presentation
Intermediate
What Attendees will Benefit Most from this Presentation
Solutions Architects, Systems Engineers, Senior Managers, CTOs, R&D
Take-Aways from this Presentation
1. Current software/hardware paradigms struggle to meet the demands of 8K and beyond, and will not catch up in time by simple evolution 2. Huge bitrates and resolutions mean parallelism must be achieved so processing of frames occurs concurrently rather than linearly 3. Moving this data around is a huge bottleneck; storage and compute must be adjacent, leveraging modern infrastuctures to shrink latency as well