Video: CDN Trends in FPGAs & GPUs

As technology continues to improve, immersive experiences are all the more feasible. This video looks at how the CDNs can play their part in enabling technologies which seem to rely on fast, local, compute. However, as with many internet services, low latency is very important.

Greg Jones from Nvidia and Nehal Mehta form Intel give us the lowdown in this video on what’s happening today to enable low-latency CDNs and what the future might look like. Intel, owners of FPGA makers Altera, and Nvidia are both interested in how their products can be of as much service at the edge as in the core datacentres.

Greg is involved in XR development at Nvidia. ‘XR’ is a term which refers to an outcome rather than any specific technology. Ostensibly ‘eXtended’ reality, it includes some VR, some augmented reality and anything else which helps improve the immersive experience. Greg explains that the importance of getting the ‘motion to photon’ delay to within 20ms. CDNs can play a role in this by moving compute to the edge. This tracks with current trends on wanting to reduce backhaul, edge computation is already on the rise.

Greg also touches on recent power improvements on newer GPUs. Similar to what we heard the other day from Gerard Phillips from Arista who said that switch manufacturers were still using technology that CPU’s were on several years ago meaning there’s plenty in the bank for speed increases over the coming years. According to Greg, the same is true for GPUs. Moreover, it’s important to compare compute per watt rather than doing it in absolute terms.

Nehal Mehta explains that, in the same way that GPUs can offload certain tasks from the CPU, so do FPGAs. At scale, this can be critical for tasks like deep packet inspection, encryption or even dynamic ad insertion at the edge,

The second half of video looks at what’s happening during the pandemic. Nehal explains that need for encryption has increased and Greg sees that large engineering functions are now, or many are soon likely to be, done in the cloud. Greg sees XR as going a long way to helping people collaborate around a large digital model and may help to reduce travel.

The last point made is regarding video conferencing all day long leaving people wanting “more meaningful interactions”. We are seeing attempts at richer and richer meeting experiences, both with and without XR.
Watch now!
Speakers

Greg Jones Greg Jones
Global Business Development, XR
NVIDIA
Nehal Mehta Nehal Mehta
Direcotr Visiual Cloud, CDN Segment,
Intel
Tim Siglin Moderator: Tim Siglin
Founding Executive Director,
Help Me Stream

Video: Edge Compute

Delivering personalised video at scale, live or otherwise, is a tradeoff between speed and complexity. In this lightning talk at Demuxed 2019, Kyle Boutette from Cloudflare explains the benefits of running code on the ‘edge’.

Kyle starts by highlighting the reason to use CDNs; they take the management of a whole fleet of servers off your hands allowing you to concentrate on delivering a video service and deploying the technology to do just that. This works really well and CDNs are the backbone of most of the large sites on the internet. Some companies build their own whilst some use Cloudflare or Amazon CloudFront among the many CDNs out there. Apart from dealing with the admin of the servers, CDNs are careful to provide servers as close to your users as practical which helps in reducing latency.

The problem that Kyle exposes is that any personalisation needs to be done on the player itself or on the server. The former requiring implementing the same features on many platforms, the latter destroying the value of the CDN since it’s based on needing the central server(s) to calculate the new information and send it to the CDN bringing us back to square one.

The solution that Cloudflare has developed allows javascript to run on the the CDN’s computers, referred to as the ‘edge’. This allows much of the logic to be done close to the consumer and gives the highest chance of reusing CDN assets whilst also reducing the latency of the requests compared to talking to the central server infrastructure. Doing this with javascript provides a well-understood environment for web developers. Kyle provides examples to understand how this can be done with relatively simple code.

Watch now!
Speaker

Kyle Boutette Kyle Boutette
Systems Engineer,
Cloudflare

Webinar: Edge Computing and Video Delivery

Date: Thursday 28th March, 2019
Time: 10am PDT / 1pm EDT / 17:00 GMT

Whether or not edge computing is the next generation of cloud technology, the edge plays a vital role in the streaming video experience. The closer a video is stored to the requesting user, the faster the delivery and better the experience. But, streaming also provides a lot more opportunity for interactivity, engagement, and data collection than traditional broadcast television. That means as the edge grows in compute capacity and functionality, it could enable new and exciting use cases, such as AI, that could improve the viewer experience. In this webinar, we’ll explore the state of edge computing and how it might be leveraged in streaming video.

Speakers

Jason Thibeault Jason Thibeault
Executive Director,
Streaming Video Alliance

Webinar: Media at the Edge – A new content technology perspective


Date: 26th July 2018, 16:00 BST

IBC365 continues it’s excellent webinars with this one looking at how pushing computing out to the ‘edge’, meaning closer to the user, will help Broadcasters.

In this webinar, you will learn:

  • What Edge computing is and why it will be key to broadcasting, media and entertainment
  • How edge computing is rapidly evolving to provide content anywhere and everywhere through the IoT and soon across 5G networks
  • What mobile edge computing means for production, processing and video distribution
  • How new consumer experiences, VR, AR, UHD streaming will be driven by the availability of edge infrastructure
  • How to secure the critical IT infrastructure which will house valuable content at the edge of the network

Register now!

Speakers:

Damon Neale

Damon Neale, Chief Technology Officer, BASE Media Cloud

Steven Carlini

Steven Carlini, Senior Director, Data Centre Global Solutions, Schenider Electric
Moderator:

Ambrose McNevin

Ambrose McNevin, Managing Director, Tech Marketing Content Ltd