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Hello,

I am doing a feasibility study into a purely Java solution for a "fast deploy, massive scale" render farm solution with production grade output. It is going to be very interesting to see just how far I can get this time. I have attempted this about every four years since 1997 just to gauge the maturity of Java market and I have been pessimistic every year until now.

I am encouraged by the JPPF feature set from a grid framework standpoint and the SunFlow project from a quality perspective (pardon the pun ;-). This time may very well be the genesis of a workable platform. So, I start the new year giving this endeavor a few hours ever night and we shall see where we end up on December 26, 2011!


Thanks,


JB

[lolo]

Hello JB,

Thank you for presenting yourself to the community. I am very hopeful that you will be successful in your project.
I don't know if you already saw this, there is a JPPF / Sunflow integration that was implemented by one of our users, and that is available as an open source project on SourceForge at http://disrender.sourceforge.net/. I'm not seeing any file or source code in the SVN repository, but you might want to contact the project admin for additional information.

In any case, please do not hesitate to bug us if you have any issue or question in using JPPF, we'll be happy to assist.

Sincerely,
-Laurent

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Laurent,

Yes, I have seen the project and the one for POV. Neither seem aimed at the specific target I'm trying to hit. I'm trying to get a more commercial type product where I can sell to clients in a more subscription style model. There is probably more money to be made in rendering previews than the final product anyways. Final production runs rarely require re-renders and take the least amount time since they are (or should be) well organised. Then again you could have a complete idiot for a director.

My thing is I confused on this whole grid computing framework. Hadoop is a nightmare to set up and in the time it takes to read your tutorials you are off rocking and rolling with a grid. So, is JPPF missing something besides the distributed file system? Something has to be off when the out-of-box experience is this smooth....


JB


PS. Then again, when I was doing a proof of concept NOSQL app Cassandra smoked HBase in just about every aspect including ease of developer adoption. Maybe Hadoop is more of a white elephant than a yellow one 

[lolo]

Hi JB,

I believe the difference in ease of use is essentially due to what initial focus was given to the framework.
I created JPPF specifically because toolkits like Globus or Hadoop were such a pain to get started with, and at the time, I was looking for a compute grid framework that would allow me to run my experiments with frequent changes in the code or in the simulation parameters. If it takes longer to deploy my changes than to write them, then it's a no-go for me. So JPPF was made with ease of use in mind from the very start.
On the other hand, JPPF and Hadoop handle different classes of problems. JPPF focuses on compute-intensive tasks (more formally it addresses the class of embarrassingly parallel problems), whereas Hadoop is made to handle and process extremely large datasets (think "Google"), hence the usefulness of a distributed file system. So here again, different focus.

Without being an expert in rendering, I do have the impression that JPPF is a better fit for this type of work, and I'm hoping this'll hold true for your project.

-Laurent

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Laurent,

I am already seeing from your perspective on this. The cool thing is since I've settled on using Amazon's cloud I can have the Hadoop distributed file system (set up for me with a simpler API called "Amazon S3") while using JPPF to do the distributed workload.

I really enjoy how fast the development cycle is with JPPF. It is more like playing a music instrument compared to nerding out with some thousand paged manual and a ball of wire barely resembling a computer. I am actually enjoying this and making headway in the process!

I may have a beta version active by late summer... knock on wood ;-)


JB