About Esferico: Case Study 3

After reviewing a range of commercially available applications, our own graphics staff came to us with a need for Render-Farm management software. This software is used on a central machine for job allocation to a large number of computers on a network - essentially a divide-and-conquor principle, reducing many months work for a single machine to a very much shorter time for tens or even hundreds of machines working in unison.

The management software needed to allow clients to submit work across the internet and pay a fee for services, then download files to a local network. The software then needed to book a job slot, allocate work to each of the participating machines on the network, assemble the resulting work and finally distribute the completed work to the client. All automatically and without human involvement.

In addition to these functional requirements, parts of the application also needed to be used in diverse environments, determined by the operating systems installed on any of the participating computers at any moment in time. This primarily meant the possiblility of Windows, Linux and Apple Mac machines all being part of the gestalt render farm.

Esferico solved the problem using our recently added REAL Software development tools. The software is now in place, and is running 24 hours a day for selected clients with general public access to the software scheduled for a future date.

Skills and products utilised:
Analysis, design and bespoke development; REALSoftware development tools on Windows, Linux and Apple Mac; non-WWW internet communications protocols; internet based MySQL database servers; client interaction with web-servers; TCP/IP network protocols; interaction with rendering engines; web-programming in PHP; interaction with 3rd party internet payments packages (e.g. PayPal)