Design and implementation of BitTorrent file system for distributed animation rendering

Abstract

Rendering is a crucial process in the production of computer generated animation movies. It executes computer programs to produce series of images which will be sequenced into a movie. However, rendering process on a single machine can be tedious, time-consuming and unproductive, especially for 3D animation. To resolve these problems, animation rendering is commonly carried out in a distributed computing environment where the rendering is distributed to a number of computers. As a result, efficient handling of such distributed animation rendering becomes a major challenging research to increase performance and reduce cost for numerous animation industries. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of BitTorrent File System (BTFS) used to improve the communication performance of distributed animation rendering. The BTFS efficiently and transparently provides data sharing among distributed computers in a peer-to-peer manner to reduce the data access time for any rendering software. The experimental results and evaluation are verified as a proof-of-concept of our architecture. Some interesting future enhancement is also discussed.