Robust large-scale rendering: the FQ renderfarm engine

Abstract

We present Framestore's renderfarm ('queue') manager, FQ. It has been in use since 2010 for CG production at all six Framestore sites, and proven with renderfarms of tens of thousands of processing cores. Its productions range from over 500 commercials to large and demanding film VFX projects such as Gravity. Our aim is provide a highly interactive renderfarm for CG artists, one which is reliable and predictable under aggressive pooling of resources. This is achieved with high performance engineering of the core system and carefully designed scheduling. A powerful system of monitoring and analytics further contributes to these goals.