A Framework for Creating a Distributed Rendering Environment on the Compute Clusters

TL;DR

This paper proposes a framework that enables distributed rendering on existing compute clusters without physical resource separation, improving resource utilization and reducing administrative costs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that integrates render farm management into compute clusters without physical resource partitioning, enhancing flexibility and efficiency.

Findings

Supports rendering tasks alongside numerical simulations

Increases resource utilization in mixed workloads

Reduces system administration complexity

Abstract

This paper discusses the deployment of existing render farm manager in a typical compute cluster environment such as a university. Usually, both a render farm and a compute cluster use different queue managers and assume total control over the physical resources. But, taking out the physical resources from an existing compute cluster in a university-like environment whose primary use of the cluster is to run numerical simulations may not be possible. It can potentially reduce the overall resource utilization in a situation where compute tasks are more than rendering tasks. Moreover, it can increase the system administration cost. In this paper, a framework has been proposed that creates a dynamic distributed rendering environment on top of the compute clusters using existing render farm managers without requiring the physical separation of the resources.