The fall 2008 semester ITS 470 Large Scale High Performance Systems course completed a project to produce a live distribution knoppix CD. Feedback from the public on these projects is highly sought after as the problems are real world. As this project is using extensively open source tools those original licenses are extended to any future use of this tool as per their licenses. The documentation package is covered under creative commons licenses. More after the jump.
Abstract
A rendering farm allows video editing software to render video, CGI or computer-generated-imagery, in a more efficient manner. This is possible by creating a computer cluster that enables the user to see the cluster as one computer and work with the computing power of that entire cluster. This will ideally allow them to perform the rendering of large video files in a much more efficient manner. This is what the ITS470 Fall 2008 class intends to develop throughout the semester. The proposal will consist of the design, implementation, and testing of a heterogeneous rendering cluster. The cluster will be designed so the individual nodes in the cluster will be transparent to the client’s rendering software. In addition, the proposal’s benchmark is set at 80%. Not only will the proposal create a functional rendering cluster but also provide a reasonable amount of performance, greatly enhancing the number of projects that can be rendered in a given time frame. This proposal will be the documentation showing the plans on how the team plans on implementing such a cluster.
Project Documentation (1.5mb pdf file)
Project ISO (690mb) MD5 Check Sum (b60fdfe215716bdbb155f1d248998604)
Very easy to follow and the layout is great. I watched as they did part of the project but my time was limited so I was unable to see how it went when finishing the script if it got that far.