Distributed rendering of computer-generated
imagery using a render cluster

Authors: Simon Goričar and Assoc. Prof. dr. Uroš Lotrič (mentor)

This is a git repository containing both the render cluster implementation and scripts for testing and analyzing its performance. It is part of a diploma thesis.

---

1. Project structure

|-- analysis
|   |> Contains a set of tools for analysis and plotting of the results, written in Python.
|
|-- blender-projects
|   |> Contains a set of reference Blender projects that were ran in the performance tests. 
|
|-- master
|   |> Rust crate containing an implementation of the cluster coordinator.
|
|-- scripts
|   |> Contains an assortment of scripts used for testing the render cluster 
|      on NSC and Arnes clusters using SLURM.
|
|-- shared
|   |> Rust crate containing structures and functionality shared between 
|      the cluster coordinator and workers.
|
|-- worker
|   |> Rust crate containing an implementation of the cluster worker.

2. Compiling

First, install Rust. Then, run the following command:

cargo build --workspace --release

Two binaries will be generated in the ./target/release directory: master and worker. Execute master --help and/or worker --help to understand how to set them up. For more information, take a look at how the scripts (see scripts/arnes/*.sh) set up test runs.

3. Running tests

To run tests on the SLURM workload manager, take a look at the scripts provided in scripts/arnes and scripts/arnes/exclusive.

4. Comparing results

First, install Python 3.11 and Poetry. Then, run the following command in the analysis directory:

poetry install

You're ready to analyze and plot. Run any individual script (e.g. speedup.py) to generate a single set of plots. To generate all the available plots (using run_all.py), like so:

poetry run python run_all.py

These scripts expect the directory blender-projects/04_very-simple/results/arnes-results to contain one or more raw tracing files (e.g. 2023-07-13_22-25-42_job-04vs_demo_10f-1w_eager-naive-coarse_raw-trace.json).

Plots will be generated in the analysis/plots directory. The plots from our tests are also available in the same directory.