HPE
An Unprecedented Product Announcement in a Game-Changing Venue
Services- Creative Services
- Photography & Video
- Animation & 2D/3D/FX
HPE Discover is the annual showcase for the firm’s most important, highest visibility initiatives.
The keynote address for the 2024 edition of HPE Discover, delivered by President & CEO Antonio Neri and with NVIDIA Founder and CEO Jensen Huang as his special guest, merited exceptional visibility. Sphere Las Vegas was chosen as the keynote venue — guaranteeing a measure of spectacle, but also extraordinary visual, technical, and creative complexity.
- 14,000attendees in person
- 15GBof custom render content
- 4 weeksfrom project initiation to delivery
Opportunity
The core initiative that would be announced in the keynote was a new AI solution, combining HPE server hardware and HPE GreenLake software with NVIDIA GPUs and tools in a set of off-the-shelf, ready-to-deploy, pre-scaled private cloud configurations. The challenge we were to solve? To depict these configurations, and all their components, in animations that would play on Sphere’s immense LED screen as Antonio Neri and Jensen Huang announced the collaboration and the solution: HPE Private Cloud AI.
The Approach
Our solution began with photoreal 3D renders of the hardware components of all four HPE Private Cloud AI configurations: storage, network switches, racks, and HPE ProLiant servers, plus the NVIDIA Tensor Core chips and NVIDIA Grace Hopper superchips built into them. Adcetera then developed animations of the NVIDIA chipsets building into latest-gen HPE ProLiant servers, as well as rack builds assembling into the four HPE Private Cloud AI configurations. In addition, we developed animations depicting the software layer controlling HPE Private Cloud AI — combining HPE Ezmeral software with ready-to-use NVIDIA tools for inferencing, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and fine-tuning.
Each video segment included sound F/X and photoreal surfaces and materials, and was timed to play at specific cues in the keynote presentation. So far, so straightforward. But all this work had to be delivered at extraordinary scale: 4K resolution, 60 frames per second, for playback on a screen that would make a standard, 42U server rack nearly 8 stories high. Combining the capabilities of our NVIDIA-powered in-house render farm with additional, outsourced resources, we delivered ahead of schedule, with files that ultimately performed even at a larger scale than originally requested.
Why Adcetera
The HPE Discover 2024 keynote had the largest attendance of any Discover keynote in the history of the company: more than 14,000 attendees in person, and tens of thousands more watching via live-stream. The size of the audience, and the significance of the announcement of HPE Private Cloud AI — an industry-leading innovation that will speed and simplify enterprise-scale adoption of secure, private generative AI — meant that the production had to go off flawlessly. Our creative and technical ability, our long record of successful delivery for HPE, and the depth of our commitment to their success earned us the call; determination ensured we’d deliver.
