An easy-to-use, low-carbon overflow solution
Founded in 2013, Iconem is an innovative startup specialised in the digitisation of endangered cultural heritage sites in 3D.
Photogrammetry to the rescue of cultural heritage
The principle of 3D modeling by photogrammetry consists in reconstituting the relief of a scene through triangulation by exploiting the correlations between thousands of digital images taken from different viewpoints.
After being reworked, these images are sent to the photogrammetry software that will allow the 3D reconstruction to be carried out by generating the first cloud of points. This first one is not very dense. The final compute can generate a cloud of several million points, and even up to 10 billion for the largest projects. But it is sometimes necessary to add a mesh step for video production. It is therefore necessary to generate meshes representing between 100 million and 10 billion polygons each. This makes remote rendering particularly interesting for a company like Iconem because the resources required are phenomenal. For example, one of the recent projects required the compute of 19K x 19K images, i.e. 360 megapixels in EXR* 16 bits per layer, which required one week of rendering on one hundred machines.
The human and sustainable aspects of Qarnot: an obvious choice for Iconem
Qarnot's ability to assist in the development of rendering processes was a key factor, as traditional render farms do not allow for such flexibility. In addition, the ability to compute on a low-carbon infrastructure was also important for Iconem.
"Coming from the animation industry, I know how problematic the heat generated by render farms is. The possibility of making this heat consumption profitable with the Qarnot technology is very satisfying.”
So all you have to do is upload files to Qarnot's web platform, along with a few parameters, and start rendering. This triggers digital boilers, installed at locations with high heat demand, to start computing while simultaneously distributing valuable heat to warm pools, district heating networks, or industries. This platform provides users with a real-time overview of the status of all rendering or calculation tasks: number and types of used machines, calculation progress and results, data and cost management, etc.
Iconem has already used 2,560 days of renderings, or more than seven years or 60,000 hours of calculation, which represents more than 1 MWh of heating energy saved thanks to Qarnot's solution.