Tractor
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. 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 is intended to replace Pixar's existing Alfred and Alfserver products. In addition it is a cost effective standalone solution that can be deployed to control a wide variety of non-render tasks such as physics simulations or compositing tasks.
Free evaluations of Tractor are available so get in touch for your copy and test-drive Tractor today. (NB. Trials are not available to students.)
Features
- Engineering focus on high-throughput job distribution for large farms.
- Simplified "plug-and-play" blade deployment on any size farm.
- Web UI for ubiquitous access.
- Simplified scripting and control using web technologies.
Benefits
- 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 customisable.
- Systems administrators can easily add Python extension modules to Tractor-Blades and customize the specifics of how various tasks are executed.
Image Copyright © Disney Pixar
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