Rendering is a crucial process in the production of computer generated animation movies. It executes a computer program to transform 3D models into series of still images, which will eventually be sequenced into a movie. Due to the size and complexity of 3D models, rendering process becomes a tedious, time-consuming and unproductive task on a single machine. As a result, animation rendering is commonly carried out in a distributed computing environment where a number of computers execute in parallel to speedup the rendering process. In accordance with the distribution of computing, the data dissemination to all computers also needs certain mechanisms which allow large 3D models to be efficiently moved to those distributed computers to ensure the reduction of time and cost in animation production. In this report, we present and evaluate the BitTorrent File System (BTFS) for improving the communication performance of distributed animation rendering. The BTFS provides an efficient, secure and transparent distributed file system which decouples the applications from the complicated communication mechanism. By having the data disseminated in a peer-to-peer manner and using local cache, the rendering time can be reduced. Its performance comparison with a production-grade 3D animation favorably shows that BTFS outperforms the traditional distributed file systems up to the factor of 4 in our test configuration.

Main researcher : Asst. Prof. Namfon Assawamekin, Ph.D.
School of Science and Technology, University of the Thai Chamber of Commerce

Co-researcher : Ekasit Kijsipongse, Ph.D.
National Electronics and Computer Technology Center