n0d3.org

Like my fancy title? What I’m really going to write about is how to manage the balance between computational power and portability. This is only relevant to people who do “heavy lifting” with their computers. Most people probably don’t even need to worry about this stuff outside of just needing more storage available on-the-go. Since lots of us have experience with manual transmission cars the concept of an optimal shift point might be useful as an analogy.

Powerful computational devices (Lower Gear)

Powerful computational devices are, at the time I write this post, desktop machines, clusters and servers. Damn physics is holding us to CPUs that generate heat (and thus require vents/fans/cooling blocks that take up physical space) and consume power (which decrease battery life). Moreover many of these computationally intensive tasks still take time. I’m talking about video cross-encoding and so forth. Serious heavy lifting and shmushing digital assets against one another (yes, shmushing is a technical term and defining it is outside the scope of this post).

Portable Computational Devices (Higher Gear)

Then there’s the stuff we need to do everyday. Multiple times a day even. Like check our email. Fire up OpenOffice. Surf a little web. These tasks don’t require much shmushing or heavy lifting. As a result, no need for cooling blocks and the power consumption is lower. This is pretty frickin’ handy because we send email a lot more often than we render video or composite HDR panoramas (at least I do).

The Problem, in a nutshell

When to shift between low and high gear? What if you’re in high gear and need to shift back? What if shifting back means travelling a few hundred miles? In a car it’s easy enough to shift gears. For computers maybe not. You need to shift into the lower gear as your need for computational power increases. And you need to shift into a higher gear as your desire to be mobile increases. But sometimes you gotta move fast and haul a heavy load.

21st Century Split Shift

What if we had a place where we stored the assets (the gigandor video files or whatever) and the instructions for what to do with those assets were light-weight (like a video edit-decision list or settings for node-based compositing or whatever–something text based that a machine can use as instructions). What if we had something portable that could control, remotely, the heavy lifting (iPod Touch, MacBook Air, Kindl, Nintendo, whatever is capable of messing with an XML file I suppose). Probably, we’re going to need some sort of low-bandwidth prep-work preview VNC voodoo to get at least a glimpse of what we’re doing on our NinKindle Air, but if the heavy lifting is done by the low-gear machine maybe it’s all going to be fine. Oh yeah, we’re going to need bandwidth too.

Here’s the shopping list:

• Heavy lifting machine
• Portable machine
• Software that can do EDL-style communication between the portable machine and the heavy lifter
• Hardware that can make previews quickly
• Bandwidth to transfer the EDL from the portable machine and previews from the heavy lifter.

I’m guessing we’re damn close on this sort of thing. Aside from the software part anyway (when is Pshop going to ship with a client/server version where the client is a NinKindle and the server is an Xserve in your basement?). It’s already easy enough to use VNC on an iPod Touch to get back to a main rig. And audio server-on-the go has done a lot for pushing data back and forth.

Anyway… what do you think?