Autodesk talks to Architosh about Octane Cloud Workstation: Autodesk Edition at Amazon

Recently Autodesk’s team working on some of the remote access technologies for their applications spoke to Architosh about how this technology works, what the steps are involved, and provided a brief demo. In the past we had a brief tour of Revit running remotely through a web browser using this technology. In this feature we go a bit deeper and learn more about Autodesk and OTOY’s technology.

On our call with us and explaining the process in detail was John Schmier, of Autodesk and Jules Urbach of OTOY.

Technology Basics: Learning about Amazon Instances and OTOY

As we wrote about before, Autodesk partnered with OTOY, the folks behind Octane Render, a GPU-accelerated unbiased physical renderer software application. We have written about Octane before. Part of the charm of this partnership is that OTOY developed the Javascript technology that speeds up FPS delivery of 3D software applications which are compute intensive.

The foundational technology that allows your web browser to quickly keep up with the re-rendering changes in a viewported experience via a browser window is WebGL. This technology is related to OpenGL and Architosh will do a WebGL primer in the near future.

Autodesk has been excited to talk to us about this technology. We actually have had a few discussions over the past few months about it and Architosh reached out to OTOY as well. OTOY and Autodesk are basically in a partnership and the fruits of that partnership at this stage are embodied in the OTOY Octane Cloud Workstation: Autodesk Edition.

You might ask: “what is a cloud workstation?”

We will answer that in a minute. At this point this technology is available for press and developers (primarily) in what Autodesk calls a “Technology Preview.” Those who Autodesk and OTOY invite in find this technology preview inside AWS (Amazon Web Services) where one can access Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (aka: EC2). If you have an Amazon account you too can find this Octane Cloud Workstation and try it out yourself.

Octane Cloud Workstation

The Octane Cloud Workstation (Autodesk Edition) is described as the “world’s first turn-key high-performance cloud desktop solution specifically designed for streaming high-end remote graphics.” This Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a Windows-based virtual desktop, hosted on Amazon EC2, and able to be delivered to any suitable web browser anywhere in the world.

Cloud Workstation details include:

• Amazon EC2 Enterprise Rack Server Iron
• NVIDIA GRID — parallelized GPU compute
• Windows 2008 R2 64-bit Operating System
• Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3DS Max, Autodesk Revit and Autodesk Inventor applications
• Octane Render Cloud Edition — enabling real-time GPU rendering on EC2
• OTOY’s next-generation ORBX Video Codec (aka: ORBX.js)
• OTOY WebCL™ remote graphics driver — the only OpenCL 1.2 GPU runtime for NVIDIA GRID

Everything listed above is what is running on the hardware at Amazon’s EC2 hosted facilities–considered some of the best in the top-tier enterprise data center options worldwide. The question “where does this solution gain its power from?” is answered in several ways.

Autodesk and OTOY are running their software on high-performance Xeon CPU server-class rack-mounted hardware. Secondly, the GPUs powering these solutions are NVIDIA GRID solution, offering parallelized multi-GPU-compute power. Users are benefitting from more than one GPU. Lastly, Octane Render, one of the world’s first and leading GPU-based photorealistic renderers, is tapping the power of the open industry standard OpenCL 1.2 via OTOY’s WebCL graphics driver.

Importantly, all of the above is what makes the solutions powerful at Amazon’s datacenter facility. The next most important piece is the technology that pipes that stream across the Internet to you at your remote location. This is where OTOY’s next-generation ORBX Video Codec comes in. This Javascript technology delivers 60 hertz ‘zero client’ HD (high-definition) cloud desktop images to any HTML 5 web browser using just pure Javascript. Therefore no plugins are required at your desktop.

Client Side Requirements

There are actually few client side requirements but this is what is vitally needed. Either you use OTOY’s native client application–available on Windows, Linux and Mac–or you use a modern browser with the ORBX.js video codec. That’s it.

next page > Taking a Closer Look

Taking a Closer Look

In the next part of this article we’ll cover many screenshots of our test runs of the Octane Cloud Workstation. In our first web meeting with Autodesk’s John Schmier we tested out and saw John demo Autodesk 3ds Max with OTOY’s Octane Render as Max’s renderer. (see image 03)

The real-time performance of Octane Render on OTOY’s Octane Cloud Workstation was excellent. And the entire experience of manipulating a model, orbiting, accessing menus and seeing the render viewport update in real-time was nearly as nice as a native experience on the desktop. On this first session we saw frames per sec (FPS) rates up to 60 and at least no less than 22.5 FPS. (see images 04-06)

In our second sessions we did two separate things in terms of accessing the Octane Cloud Workstation. We discovered when working through Amazon Web Instances that another way to run this cloud workstation is to use a Microsoft Virtual Desktop application for the Mac. That solution was another method but not what Autodesk wanted us to focus on.

Closing Comments – So Where Is All This Going?

Autodesk says that at this time this is a Technology Preview open to developers and selected press. The goal says Autodesk is to eventually turn this into a service of some sorts. There was no specific mention of how this may get packaged nor the timing of a delivery on some sort of service.

Some other interesting aspects of what we have explored thus far is that up to four (4) people can be logged into the same instance at the same time. In one session with Autodesk it was noticed that different people can take over the mouse. It is not coordinated through software however, it just kind of happens. You have to verbally announce to the others that you want control of the mouse. Having a collaborative work session via an instance on the OTOY Octane Cloud Workstation could be useful in many situations.

1280 x 800 was the resolution used in our instances work. Clearly the OTOY javascript technology will get better–as will WebGL–making the whole system faster and better to use. In our last session, shown above where we worked with Autodesk Inventor, the performance was slower partly because our instance was a “west coast” instance. When you launch an EC2 Amazon instance you locate yourself in the world so that the appropriately located EC2 instance is created. In other words, with Amazon data centers located all over the world, you ideally want the closest route to actual hardware.

Another question folks may have is how do you get your work to the Octane Cloud Workstation via an instance? There are several ways. One way would be to use something like Dropbox or Autodesk 360 cloud accounts. Other types of cloud storage could work as well. You could email materials back and forth through popular web mail services like Google’s Gmail.

Autodesk is working on technology that will make accessing files even more easy and automated, particularly with Autodesk 360.

What Does This Mean for Native Mac Development?

It is not clear and certainly Autodesk isn’t going to say how this technology will affect larger development plans for Windows and Mac OS X. Various markets have wanted different apps native on OS X for quite some time. In the AEC market Revit for the Mac is in big demand. A large part of that demand is actually by current Autodesk Revit users who simply want to run the popular BIM application on Apple hardware rather than Windows machines.

Autodesk 3ds Max has long had a similar user base wishing for Mac support. Also the fact that Autodesk Maya 2014 was shown on the Octane Cloud Workstation may concern some Maya Mac users that perhaps the company is planning on ditching native OS X support.

The market will just have to wait to learn more about where Autodesk takes this technology and how it packages it as software as a service (SaaS). One thing is clear. There are unique advantages to having engineering software delivered over the Web as a service. Chief among them is the rent to access economic benefits. Another is the possibility to access your work from anywhere on just about any computer or device. And a third is the Nvidia GRID GPU technology which can aid workflows by speeding up “real-time” rendering far beyond what you may get off your single workstation in your office.

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