Gekko's blog
End of Renderfarm.fi Summer of Code
Submitted by Gekko on Thu, 2011-09-01 12:24The summer of year 2011 was filled with action. Our team was focused on getting some desperately wanted features in, updating both the hardware and software, performing some long overdue repairs and visiting some conferences. We had two additional developers as interns at the farm (Eero Salminen who worked on the sceensaver and Davis Sorenson who handles some Drupal and website matters) in addition to our usual crew. In midst of this small team we managed to get quite a bit done!
New developments
First of all is probably our most visible new feature: the screensaver! Eero worked on this all the summer and managed to make something that is almost finished for the Windows platforms. On other operating systems you will have to wait a bit longer as the screensaver is still largely in testing, but we are for sure making those if at all possible. The screensaver is ready for deployment and will be probably available for Windows testing soon. Please report any issues you have with it.
An important upgrade was our server hardware. We moved large parts of the system in a new hard drive, and I can assure you that we no longer are going down due to hard drive issues. The fantastic Otaverkko officially became our sponsor by hosting our system and managing some parts of the backups. In addition we did some big overhauls in the server in general, but these shouldn't be visible to the end user. I can only promise that system is more stable than ever before!
I was personally involved in getting multithreading operational for the rendering clients. This is supported to a good degree at the BOINC side, and BURP already has this support for Windows and Linux machines. I had my difficulties in getting the OS X machines working though, but eventually that succeeded. Multithreading should mean that your BOINC clients no longer launch multiple instances of Blender if you have a multicore machine, but instead allocates all available cores for one task. This means that your memory usages have just gone down by a great quantity, and you no longer have to do maths to make sure your computer doesn't turn into marmelade due to your BOINC allocating memory for multiple Blender instances.
Blender support now and in the future
We have been listening to critique on the interface of our Blender Uploader and have since been re-writing large portions of it. The upcoming version, which is not ready yet, should be more logical. It now gives more human-readable errors and handles the texture packing and linked data packing more carefully. It also makes managing your own renders more easier, requires your correct login right away instead of checking for it during the file upload, has less fields to fill and doesn't require the user to check his settings at all! Indeed, this is a big update: We have moved the entire setting hassle to the other end of the rendering phase by utilizing our new command line rendering script.
The settings are now handled by the rendering client a bit before the rendering task launches, so all that you as a user have to do is upload your animation without worrying about having/not having threads set to Fixed, 1 or save buffers being disabled. I've been testing the script on quite a few of the arriving animations, and I have probably narrowed down most of the bugs, but do report any you find. The script also fixes the bug in BOINC which occasionally displays the rendering having a negative percentage or the percentage resetting itself due to the .blend using layered rendering / motion blur.
We ended up skipping building Blender 2.58 (first one we did in the whole series) rendering clients entirely as we were largely occupied with other matters. However, we now have the 2.59 clients ready and they should be doing their crunching on your computers right now. Thanks to the new command line rendering script mentioned above we are able to make new Blender clients in an easier fashion and can use the official Blender releases instead of always compiling our own versions and managing our own custom Blender with our command line rendering changes in its source code. This means that in future we should be able to make new releases a lot faster.
Other activities
During the summer Julius was at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, Canada, while I visited Assembly 2011 here in Finland and the annual BOINC workshop, this time held at the Max Planck Insitute in Hannover, Germany. At SIGGRAPH and Assembly we were spreading the love in forms of Blender DVDs and Renderfarm.fi posters. The Blender DVDs, printed in collaboration with Studio Lumikuu and the Blender Foundation, turned out to be in great demand at all the events. In total we gave out 1700 DVD's in these events! At the BOINC workshop I had a small presentation about Renderfarm.fi in addition to writing some code and discussing with many of the main BOINC developers. I also took a look at how the upcoming Virtual Machine support in BOINC is advancing. Even though things look promising, we will not be deploying VM's anytime soon. There are still too many outstanding issues for Renderfarm.fi to switch to using them right at this moment.
So what's next? At least making the screensaver also available for both OS X and Linux, library support for fluids and other simulations (Janus has already worked a lot on this, but this still requires some code so you can actually use it), Blender 2.60 clients and save states. In addition we will of course keep on improving the uploader script, kill bugs as they are found and help artists in the creation of their 3D art. Meanwhile, thanks for flying with Renderfarm.fi and keep on crunching!
Backside of the freebie Blender DVD given out at SIGGRAPH and Assembly 2011, original design by Francesco Siddi
Renderfarm.fi goes Amiga!
Submitted by Gekko on Sun, 2012-04-01 11:15
Blender 2.61 rendering client and next week updates
Submitted by Gekko on Thu, 2011-12-15 17:11Today we deployed Blender 2.61. This version of Blender was a highly anticipated one as it added, officially, the Cycles rendering, motion tracking and ocean simulations among other things. I'm not sure if the ocean sims will work properly at the farm, but you are free to send us a test if we don't beat you to it. From what I understand the simulation data is similar as the one used for fluid simulations which makes it a bit challenging to include it with the .blend file. Then again, I may be wrong. I'll write more about this on the forums if it feels appropriate. Cycles rendering won't be available yet as we need to figure out how to handle the validation and choose one of the possible approaches in the rendering: We are thinking if we should use a fixed sample count for each render, or let each machine render for a set duration of time, then return whatever they have finished and merge all the results into a complete frame. Cycles allows this sort of merging, and it might be ideal for our service.
In other news, we will have some major updates in our schedule. Starting with today's new rendering client we continue on Tuesday with a BURP update (more like upgrade) with Nathan (jesterKing) which will mean that the service will go down for a few days. We have a lot of work to do in order to change the entire server's structure to work with this new BURP. As a result Renderfarm.fi should be able to take advantage of Janus' work from the past few months which include... well, you can go look at the BURP tracker yourself. It's a big upgrade with a lot of desperately needed features! Following this update we will move on to a severe and very much due general Drupal maintenance.
Then, we are not sure. What do you think? We have a list of features and bugs in our TODO. The most notable two of those are Cycles and library support. Let's see when we get those rolling.