David Staas

Highly scalable digital front end architectures for digital printing

HPs digital printing presses consume a tremendous amount of data. The architectures of the Digital Front Ends (DFEs) that feed these large, very fast presses have evolved from basic, single-RIP (Raster Image Processor) systems to multirack, distributed systems that can take a PDF file and deliver data in excess of 3 Gigapixels per second to keep the presses printing at 2000+ pages per minute. This paper highlights some of the more interesting parallelism features of our DFE architectures. The high-performance architecture developed over the last 5+ years can scale up to HPs largest digital press, out to multiple mid-range presses, and down into a very low-cost single box deployment for low-end devices as appropriate. Principles of parallelism pervade every aspect of the architecture, from the lowest-level elements of jobs to parallel imaging pipelines that feed multiple presses. From cores to threads to arrays to network teams to distributed machines, we use a systematic approach to move bottlenecks. The ultimate goals of these efforts are: to take the best advantage of the prevailing hardware options at our disposal; to reduce power consumption and cooling requirements; and to ultimately reduce the cost of the solution to our customers.