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

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. Keywords—distributed; rendering; animation; render farm; cluster