DVD

The 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 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 

Overnight Renderfarm.fi received it's 5000th user registration. We've gone from 3000 to 5000 in just little over 3,5 months. I think that's amazingly cool. As the real registered user number 5000 and account number 5000 don't coincide (some accounts have been withheld for spamming during the past two years or so), we've decided to contact both account owners in order to send them a golden oldie over mail: Blender Essentials by Roland Hess.

As noted in the previous blog post, we also held a small competition to cherish the moment. We received almost 30 entries on various media platforms for the competition to find out who's the voice of Big Buck Bunny on our "What is Renderfarm.fi?" video. Among the fun entries were suggestions that the voice was generated by Python, that it was Jeff Murdoch from the TV series "Coupling" (loved that one;) or that BBB was acted by Nathan Letwory or even Ton Roosendaal of the Blender Foundation. As there was no right answer to this question we'll leave it at that. The winners of these competitions have been contacted on the relevant media through which they entered. A big thanks to all who participated!

At SIGGRAPH and ASSEMBLY 2011

Among other news, Renderfarm.fi will be represented at both the yearly SIGGRAPH convention in Vancouver, Canada and at ASSEMBLY 2011 in Helsinki, Finland. As the two great events unfortunately conincided this year, we're splitting the task of participating between RF.fi staff: yours truly will be at SIGGRAPH and Gekko (Jesse Kaukonen) at ASSEMBLY. I'm part of the Blender Foundation's stand crew at SIGGRAPH, while at ASSEMBLY Gekko will be holding a small stand for both Blender and Renderfarm.fi. At both events we'll be giving out hundreds of free Blender DVD's which we're sponsoring jointly with the Blender Foundation and Studio Lumikuu.

The stands at both events will likely act as hubs for people interested in Blender and volunteer computing, so in case you or your friends are visiting either event, be sure to come visit us. We'll also try to put some reports, pics and video material from the events online as soon as we can. The fastest way to be informed about these would be to follow our Twitter feed. PS. The Blender Foundation is still handing out free tickets to the trade show. In case you live in Vancouver or close by, be sure to get one here!

Statistics: A Monthly Newsletter?

Finally some quick statistics: last month's most volunteered for session was 3104 by user DexterLB. The session was participated in by 565 hosts and 2,310 cores, while 8,456 wu's, 28,809 results, 3.4 avg result/wu, 26,536 valid results, 26,419 granted results and 2,273 error results were delivered. All this computing (equivalent of nearly 260 days on a single average CPU) was done from start to finish in just 10 days, 19 hours and 45 minutes. Thank you to all volunteers! :)

In relation to this data I'd like to start a discussion about a newsletter that would be created and mailed once a month to all users who want to have it. What do you guys think about this? What would be the best way to opt in or out? Conversations to be held in the Forum!

The final produce of the ORE project (2008-2010, Laurea University of Applied Sciences), the so-called ORE DVD, started shipping today to members of unions and associations functioning in Finnish creative industries. Some 850 members of ATL, SIO Ornamo, TKO Ornamo and Satu ry are expected to receive the DVD, which includes the Renderfarm.fi build of Blender 2.5, open movies Big Buck Bunny and Elephant's Dream and many Finnish productions where Blender has been used as a part of the workflow (here's a great example). The DVD was created in order to promote both Blender and Renderfarm.fi to Finnish SME's functioning in the creative industries.

Query to Finnish SME's in Creative Industries

The DVD is being shipped with a questionnaire on the use and understanding of social media and open licensing among SME's in the Finnish creative industry. The results of the returned question forms will hopefully shed light on the current standing of the open movement in the creative fields in Finland. During the next week or two, we will translate the questionnaire and ask the same questions from you guys. Perhaps the cross-referencing of the results could provide some additional information. All resulting studies and theses' will be made available through Renderfarm.fi for your viewing pleasure.