Pixar releases a sweet little application called Tractor, a new distributed processing solution for Renderman and other applications.
“Tractor 1.0 is Pixar’s totally new, next generation, distributed processing solution for rendering and other network intensive applications. Derived from years of experience in managing the computational demands of the worlds largest render farms, Tractor is specifically engineered to address the extreme scalability and performance requirements of multi-core networks of tens of thousands of processors and more. Functionally, Tractor consists of three primary components:
- The Tractor-Engine maintains the central job queue and dispatches tasks.
- The Tractor-Blade is a Python based execution server running on each remote node.
- The Tractor-Dashboard is a customizable web browser user interface providing centralized control of the Tractor-Engine.
Tractor’s streamlined architecture is designed for rapid deployment, delivering very high performance with a queuing engine capable of dispatching over 500 tasks per second. Tractor utilizes proven, open web standards and is highly customizable. Systems administrators can easily add Python extension modules to Tractor-Blades and customize the specifics of how various tasks are executed.”
Features
1. Engineering focus on high-throughput job distribution for large farms.
2. Simplified “plug-and-play” blade deployment on any size farm.
3. Web UI for ubiquitous access.
4. Simplified scripting and control using web technologies.