For those of you who don't know, Janus (aka Flare on Elysiun) has built a distributed blender rendering system that uses the same client as seti@home. Basically this means that once you sign up you can submit renders that are completed in a fraction of the time you would spend, because they are processed when people are away from their computers.
Flare already wrote about this, Lightning! Why are you double posting?
Flare runs linux. He has already built the BURP system from the ground up. However, because he runs linux it is very difficult for him to build windows versions of the modified blender.exe needed to render in the background (the two os's arent terribly compatible
). For this reason, he needs someone to build the windows client from source.For more information, read the news article on the burp home page.
Finally, let me give you an example of the power of grid computing.
Say there are a thousand computers on the BURP system, but eight hundred are in use. This leaves two hundred free. You have an animation that you want to render. There are four hundred frames, and each takes ten minutes. In total, that would take 66.6 recurring hours, or just under three days! Instead, submit the animation to burp, and the whole thing would only take twenty minutes. Of course, thats under optimum conditions, but it gives you an idea. Even if it took a day on burp, that would be a third of the time it would take you on your own.
Thanks for reading this, and I hope one of you developers takes the few hours needed to compile the windows client. You never know, it may save someone two days of rendering.