Big and Ugly Rendering Project
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Big and Ugly Rendering Project (BURP), is a non-commercial distributed computing project using the BOINC framework. It is currently under development to work as a publicly distributed system for the rendering of 3D graphics.
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[edit] 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.
The fundamental goal of BURP is to give users access to computing power to render animations that would take an impossibly long time on a single computer. By dividing the work among hundreds of computers, an animation that takes possibly months to render in CPU time could be completed in only a few days.
[edit] History
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- The BURP website went online on 17 June 2004. At that time the only supported renderer was Yafray and the website was very basic.
- In August it became clear that Yafray was not the best choice as the first renderer and focus was shifted towards Blender - a more feature-full renderer with a more compact file format.
- Already in the end of October enough tests had been done to show that not only is distributed rendering of 3D animations possible but it is also possible to achieve a fairly good performance that in some cases can rival even high-end commercial render farms. The current trend of increasing network bandwidth throughout the world will make it even more interesting over time.
- The rest of 2004 was used to improve and develop the website frontend for the system.
- Until May 2005 the Linux and Windows clients got major code overhauls and loads of tests were done to estimate and improve performance of several aspects of the data transfer systems. Most importantly code for a mirroring system started to emerge. The project is currently in the alpha stage.
