To increase the pace of our progress on DistRen, we are switching our queueing system to MySQL. This will provide many benefits, such as a more integrated http frontend, and will make development move along a lot faster.
Our user manager in the server code is now pretty much complete. We have yet to integrate it with our client-server communication interface and distrenclient to allow user registration through various methods. Client-server connectivity via remoteio now has calls in the client and server code, and will likely near completion very soon.
The distren website is now available at http://distren.org/ with a prototype interface. A website has also been created for the project, at http://project.distren.org/. Expect this blog to be migrated to the distren.org domain in the near future.
More development has gone on, and the server code is beginning to take shape. The linked-list queue and frameset array appear to be nearing the point at which they may be functional. Also, some control functions have been written to make the manipulation of the jobs an the server itself possible.
DistRen seems like it may reach Milestone 0 within the next month or two, depending on the availability of developers’ time. Check back soon for more updates, and hopefully a functional build of the software.
The hope is that by the end of August, we will have reached Milestone 0. Milestone 0 will be the point at which we can distribute frames to clients. The clients can be manually registered, require manual configuration, and other things undesirable in a final release. If we reach this milestone soon, it will allow for more slow and incremenal progress while the developers attend college. The pre-milestone 0 work is a bit more intensive, and involves a lot of work being done at one time. It would be conducive to the development of DistRen to have this milestone completed quite soon.
The majority of slave and client code for job management and assigning has been written, and client code can now handle rendering frames. We now must standardize an XML format for jobs to be given to slaves, and we must finish remotio—the code that handles slave communication over SSH.
Also, development is starting on a QT-based gui, and a web interface will be built before long. These interfaces will all feed off of XML generated by the server and/or the slave software, so it is code-independant of the rest of the project. Check out our progress by looking at our repository: http://protofusion.org/hg/DistRen
More details have been defined, as shown in new conf files in the repository, and eventually we plan on distren being a multi-homed system with multi-user storage, although we have yet to ponder the implications of this type of system. Single-homed will be the goal for now.
Be sure to check out our roadmap, topology, and design plans at http://protofusion.org/wiki/DistRen
DistRen is the open-source distributed processing framework, a project of [protofusion].
Distren will provide a lightweight framework for distributed applications, such as visual rendering with videos and animations, as well as still image rendering. Plugin-style code can be written for DistRen, providing limitless applications compatible with the distributed network.
DistRen is currently in the early stages of development and is not yet ready for alpha release, however the code is availible on the [protofusion] repository. If you wish to contribute to this project or if you have any ideas, drop us a message at admin@protofusion.org
