The year that just ended was a different one, with significant events happening: we lived through a worldwide pandemic, that changed the way we all live. On a different scale, another very meaningful event happened: a country completed the process of leaving the European Union for the first time in history.
As the only thing we can do is to push through, we focused on doing exactly that. And looking back now, I can say that 2020 was, for RenderStreet, the year with the highest number of major improvements from our 8-year activity.
The improvements touched all aspects of our rendering processes: from our infrastructure to our interaction with you. First, we upgraded our GPUs with faster ones, with more memory – without any increase in prices. After that, we upgraded our infrastructure, improved both the processing speed and the connectivity of our customer-facing servers, and added an EU endpoint. This means faster upload and download speed for all our customers, plus faster processing of the projects – especially for very large renders – for a quicker turnaround time overall. All the upgrades have been made while regular operations continued, and all user accounts have been moved to the closest available endpoint.
The infrastructure upgrades also brought online new capabilities – such as improved caching for faster job start-up times, and also the possibility to offer private endpoints for customers that wish for an extra layer of separation while using our service.
At the same time, we completed and released our new render management interface. Totally re-created from scratch, this new interface is packed with more functionality and is now mobile and tablet-friendly, so you can easily check your progress from any device. Along with the new functionality, the upload process has been improved and now it’s significantly faster and more fault-tolerant.
Another part of the release was the new Blender plug-in. Integrated with the new render management interface, this new version benefits from the same improvement in upload speed, and also offers more functionality in the plug-in interface and a better collection of all project assets.
In addition to this, there were also a number of small improvements and added functionality to our service, many of them as a result of your requests.
All of the above happened while maintaining our normal operation – rendering your projects throughout the year. Last year we rendered roughly 30% more server-hours compared to 2019. The projects varied as usual, as requested by the artists who created them: from single jobs having over 21,000 frames (that’s over 14 minutes of video at 24 fps) to single jobs totaling over 5 months of server-time (and delivered by RenderStreet in a few hours) and to single frames totaling 190 hours of server-time – and delivered in a couple of hours by our farm. The constant element was, as until now, our success rate in delivering them: over 99.9% – the same as in the previous years. And we’ve broken a new record: more than 300 V100 GPUs rendering for a single account. This means 4.2 PetaFLOPS of computing power with a click of a button – a good number 70 in the top of today’s most powerful supercomputers.
2020 has been a different year, I believe we can all agree on this. For a significant number of people, it has been more difficult than any other year – restrictions, job losses or the need to adapt to a different way of life. At RenderStreet, we made changes in our way of working, as well. But we never lost focus, and always kept in mind our goals. I’m glad to look back and see that we’ve been able to help quite a few artists over the past year. And we are committed to doing so in this year, too.
2021 is already showing promise: the vaccine campaigns have started in a lot of countries, and there is hope that the world will get back to spinning at a normal rate again. It’s very likely that the new definition of ‘normal’ won’t be the same one as in 2019. But, whatever happens, know you can count on RenderStreet to deliver your work.
May we all live interesting times 🙂
Marius Iatan
CEO, RenderStreet
