1. Creating a Renderfarm Using Grid Technology
James Reid
Spring 2006

2. Outline What is a renderfarm? What is a grid? GSU’s Grid
Putting the two together
3D package
Grid package
Demo
Pros & Cons

3. What is a Renderfarm.
3D animated movies consist of thousands of frames.
Average 90 min. movie will have around 162,000 frames
Depending on the complexity of the frame, the job could be done on one machine
If (a big if) it only takes one second to render a frame it would take about 2 days to render that many frames

4. What is a Renderfarm.
It’s not uncommon for a single frame to take 6+ hours to render.
Multiply that by 162,000 frames and that’s a long time!
So, a renderfarm is a farm of computers that all render frames in parallel.
2 types of rendering
1) Split the image among the farm and parse image together when finished
2) Render one image per machine.

5. What Is A Grid? From www.grid.org
Grid computing is a form of distributed computing that involves coordinating and sharing computing, application, data, storage, or network resources across dynamic and geographically dispersed organizations

6. GSU’s Grid GSU purchased United Devices (UD) in 2005.
Currently only have one application running on it
Blender – 3D modeling and animating tool
Currently have 301 machines connected to the grid
We can have up to 1000 active at any one time

7. GSU’s Grid
United Devices is also responsible for the World Community Grid project
GSU’s UD agent uses xml-rpc calls for communication
Also uses SOAP

8. Putting The Two Together
I’m teaching csc4840 (Computer Graphics Imaging)
We use Blender for our animations
Blender is an open source 3D modeling package which is rapidly reaching the level of Maya and 3DS Max
For better project results we needed more rendering time.

9. Putting The Two Together
Unfortunately, I had introduce another central point of failure into the workflow.
I created a server for my students to upload their Blender files to.
From there I do some pre-processing to the files and then send it off.
I also gather the results and zip them up for the students to download.

10. Putting The Two Together
I used c# to interface with the grid server.
Other options include
c/c++
java
perl
Any .net language
Students upload their file to my server
I preprocess it
Send it to the grid
Monitor it
Pull the results back to my server
Notify the student via that they can download their job

11. Demo
Going to start a rendering job here and submit one to the grid.

12. Pros & Cons Pros Cons Dramatically decreases rendering time
14 day job on a 3.0 Ghz machine was finished in an hour and half on 230 machines (ranging from PIII to Dual Core machines)
Cons
Central point of failure.
If the Grid Server goes down the grid will be come ineffective, thus forcing rendering to be done on single machines

13. The End
Any Questions?