BURP - Public Distributed Rendering Network

[Richard McCarthy]

I got this idea of publically accessable distributed rendering network - pooling together everyone's computer resources over internet for rendering, and thought it might be a good idea to search it first, lo and behold, someone beat me to it.

 

 

The BURP idea

The idea is to use spare CPU cycles on participating computers around the world to render 3D images and animations submitted by the users of the BURP network - in other words to build a large shared render farm that can be freely used by those who also contribute computing power to it. The potential processing power of a system like this is enormous - theoretically the speed is only limited by network bandwidth. BURP hopes to make animations and images public as soon as they are finished so that all participants will be able to see the outcome.

 

 

What is BURP ? :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_and_Ugly_Rendering_Project

BURP Website :

http://burp.boinc.dk

[JamesTaylor]

this looks quite interesting, unfortunately it only looks as if they have blender as a useable application. Would be excellent to see max and vray available across the nodes too!

[Devin Johnston]

There are a couple of problems with a system like this and they all have to do with bandwidth. I've seen Max files that are several hundred megs not counting textures, so your first problem is sending out the Max file. Then you have to either store all the maps on the local computer or have all of the rendering computers linking back to the computer which submitted the job in order to download the maps. If you use any special plugins these would have to be installed on all machines which means everyone in the network has to purchase a copy of that software. Once it's rendered either the machines have to store the image files and then send them back to the client computer or send each image after it's been rendered. If you’re doing an animation this would translate into gigabytes of information which even a high speed internet connection is going to have major trouble with. You’re also facing the problem of configuring each computer on the network exactly the same, if you don't you can potentially have flickering because certain frames will be rendered differently. Until bandwidth is much faster than it is now I don't see how this kind of system could work.