August 08, 2011
This week brought great news for small animation filmmakers around the world following the announcement that Pixar’s proprietary rendering software would soon be delivered via the cloud.
One of the most talked about cloud-based supercomputing application development startups this year, GreenButton, has announced that it has partnered with Pixar studios to enable web-based access to its famous RenderMan software.
RenderMan has been at the root of some of the most popular animated films in the last decade, including Cars, Lord of the Rings and Avatar.
GreenButton has scored over $1 million in funding from big names in technology, including Microsoft to develop applications that can be built into SaaS applications running on hosted HPC resources. Furthermore, the RenderMan software will reside on the Windows Azure cloud computing platform, enhancing Microsoft’s cloud visibility by bringing more developers, designers and other tech-savvy creatives into its fold.
As GreenButton’s CMO stated, the company plans to rent out the RenderMan software and processing power to users over the internet and split the revenue with Pixar. The report went on to note that “the software and computing grunt needed to power it had traditionally been beyond the budgets of small to mid-tier animation and visual effects firms or one-man operations.”
All talk about the actual license and usage costs aside (those details are still shrouded), this could spark a new era of high-end filmmaking by smaller companies, bringing an explosion of new, expertly animated and rendered entertainment.
Full story at Stuff.co.nz
Researchers from the Suddhananda Engineering and Research Centre in Bhubaneswar, India developed a job scheduling system, which they call Service Level Agreement (SLA) scheduling, that is meant to achieve acceptable methods of resource provisioning similar to that of potential in-house systems. They combined that with an on-demand resource provisioner to ensure utilization optimization of virtual machines.
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Experimental scientific HPC applications are continually being moved to the cloud, as covered here in several capacities over the last couple of weeks. Included in that rundown, Co-founder and CEO of CloudSigma Robert Jenkins penned an article for HPC in the Cloud where he discussed the emergence of cloud technologies to supplement research capabilities of big scientific initiatives like CERN and ESA (the European Space Agency)...
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When considering moving excess or experimental HPC applications to a cloud environment, there will always be obstacles. Were that not the case, the cost effectiveness of cloud-based HPC would rule the high performance landscape. Jonathan Stewart Ward and Adam Barker of the University of St. Andrews produced an intriguing report on the state of cloud computing, paying a significant amount of attention to the problems facing cloud computing.
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