Internet render farm
4 messages in this thread
Here's an interesting implication of a WinNT-based 3D Studio: With the Remote
Access Service (RAS), you can easily connect to the Internet via PPP.
You can also run other LAN Manager protocols via RAS. With this, you can
easily mount a drive remotely across the Internet. All it takes is an entry in
LMHOSTS and then you can use ordinary File Manager "connect to network drive"
operations or a command line NET command to link to the remote system's drive.
With this, you could make an Internet-based rendering farm. I recently read a
press release about Electric Image on the Mac offering a similar service…
they apparently place their office Macs on the Internet, available for
net-rendering to their customers. Think of all those computers at Autodesk that
aren't in use late at night… 🙂
Sounds like a total nightmare to me…
Great, then we can have all those machines sitting in our net as failed with no
way to "clean" them unless we hop on a plane and fly around the country to
reset them. <G>
There isn't much preventing you from doing it today. Anyone running a NFS
network can do that with release 4. The problem though, you'd better get a T1
link or it will take longer to transfer the images than the time it took to
render them, defeating the whole purpose of network rendering. Not to mention
the initial transfer of the project file, maps and what not.