Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS: NFS over RDMA for Media > Autodesk Flame 2022 results
Autodesk Flame is a sophisticated visual effects, compositing and finishing application. Flame is demanding both in terms of workstation performance and storage performance. To verify systems can meet Flame’s requirements, Autodesk has implemented a regimented qualification process for Flame. The qualification of PowerScale and OneFS 9.2 with Flame 2022 provided a perfect chance to compare TCP and RDMA performance.
Workstation CPU and GPU utilization were more of a limiting factor in these tests than storage performance. Often the differences between TCP and RDMA were minimal because workstation bottlenecks were reached before storage performance. One notable exception was real-time playback of 59.94 frames per second 4K DCI material. With this test, the extra CPU cycles afforded by RDMA resulted in a major improvement in broadcast output.
The full suite of Flame 2022 tests was run against a 4-node PowerScale F800 cluster connected using 40 GbE to a Dell Precision 7920 workstation. On the Dell workstation, system BIOS was configured for performance mode and the Flame 2022 ISO installed. On the PowerScale F800 cluster, streaming mode was enabled for directories with video files and filename-based prefetch configured for directories with image sequences.
The real-time playback test consists of playing back challenging material with debug mode enabled in Flame. Debug mode displays dropped frame counters for video disk (PowerScale), GPU, and broadcast output. While running the tests with both TCP and RDMA, the “video disk” never dropped frames. The video disk, PowerScale F800, delivered enough performance.
By contrast, with the file system mounted using TCP, there were many dropped frames in the broadcast output. By mounting the file system using RDMA, there were few dropped frames from the broadcast output. The impact was dramatic with upwards of 6000 dropped frames for TCP compared with 11 (yes, 11) dropped frames for RDMA. As mentioned, the video disk never dropped frames. It was all about freeing up the workstation to send video to the broadcast output (in this case, an AJA Kona4 card).
In the following figure, the Y-Axis is dropped frames. A lower bar indicates a better result.