Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: NFS over RDMA for Media > 6K PIZ compressed EXR image sequence playback, 24 frames per second
8K uncompressed image sequences are an unwieldy format that is not widely used. 8K uncompressed uses up a tremendous amount of storage space and bandwidth. By comparison, 6K PIZ compressed EXR image sequences are a more common format in cinematic production.
6K resolution provides enough flexibility to zoom into a portion of the image and maintain sharpness. PIZ compression is a lossless codec, meaning image quality is maintained while still saving storage space and bandwidth. The challenge posed by PIZ compressed EXR is that it is extremely taxing on the workstation. The individual frames are still large, often over 100 MB each, and the workstation must decompress each frame in real time.
The PIZ compressed EXR image sequence used in this testing had frame sizes ranging from 80 MB to 110 MB. The frame size varied depending on how well each individual frame compressed. This frame size meant each client would require 2640 MB/s of performance.
The 3-node F600 could sustain playback of 3x simultaneous PIZ compressed image sequences. It is likely that the cluster could have sustained even more, but the three clients could only handle one of these challenging image sequences each. As with the 8K material above, with the file system mounted using TCP, the images sequences would not play back, RDMA is vital.