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Big Projects, Small Windows
Based in the Boston area, Product Insight is a product design and engineering firm with a diverse team that works on equally diverse projects. Over the last three decades, Product Insight has provided innovative solutions across a multitude of industries, with projects ranging from an Autonomous Vehicle Sensor Hat to the Fractyl Revita® endoscopic therapy system to the Avid Axcel Mobility Chair, winner of the 2023 Mobility Product Award.
The Product Insight team has become known for their expertise in developing products for some of the most challenging and technologically advanced industries. One of the biggest challenges they often face, however, is the time constraint placed on them by their clients’ immediate needs. Then, it becomes a race against the clock. In their recent project for Mevion Medical systems, their window to render the design animations was a matter of days, faster than their on-premises infrastructure could achieve. This sent them on a search for a cloud provider who could supply render-optimized compute at scale and provide the support to get a cloud-native team up and running quickly. Anthony Catacchio, the V.P. of Engineering at Product Insight, described the process:
Product Insight – Creating a Vision of the Future
The Task
Mevion Medical Systems is a leading provider of compact proton therapy systems for radiation treatment for cancer patients. They have been partnering with Product Insight on design, engineering, and visualization projects for over 10 years. The latest collaboration, on the Mevion S250-FIT Proton Therapy System, was their largest visualization undertaking to date. For the 2022 ASTRO conference, Mevion requested a 1,200-frame 3ds Max animation and gigapixel still-renders for their booth. This deliverable required several orders of magnitude more in compute than any previous effort by Product Insight.
The Solution
When Product Insight turned to CoreWeave for their Mevion project, their requirements for successful execution included scalable compute, powerful hardware optimized for rendering, and above all, that they needed the job done as fast as possible. At CoreWeave, we take immense pride in the broad range of SKUs that we offer, as well as the virtually instantaneous scalability of our hardware, built on a Kubernetes infrastructure which allows for the fastest and most cost-efficient workflow execution on the market.
Jacob Feldman, our in-house VFX pipeline specialist at CoreWeave, set up the workflows in the cloud and facilitated the migration of the team’s animations, built on Arnold on-premises, onto CoreWeave. The teams decided that the best GPU for the job was the NVIDIA RTX A5000, and due to the availability and scalability of compute at CoreWeave, they were able to spin up 1,000 to 1,500 of the GPUs at a time and complete 1,200 compute hours of work in a day.
For Product Insight, the focus is on the product, not the VFX pipeline. Any compute time comes directly out of their design and engineering development timelines. The near-infinite scale afforded by CoreWeave allows them to be more efficient overall. This efficiency benefits both their business and their clients by allowing more time for billable hours in a tight window and enabling them to deliver higher-quality assets in a fixed timeframe.
According to the team, this cloud model now allows them to take on projects of any size, without fear of astronomical spending or unacceptable completion times due to on-premises limitations. Anthony Catacchio said of the project migration: “Instead of taking two months, it took two days.” This, as mentioned before, allows for more productivity in other facets of the project, according to Catacchio: “The shorter the pipeline is, the more work we can get done, and the more time our people have to deliver on their vision. We always have a timeline, usually for a trade show or launch, so we are very deadline-based in our workflows.”
CoreWeave and Product Insight was a match made in heaven, and we are so impressed with how their animation turned out. Check out the display of their workflow and the final rendering of the Mevion S250-FIT:
Proton Therapy System: Mevion FIT – Product Insight
You can also watch the full video on Mevion’s website here.
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