Nov 23, 2009
Cloud Computing for CG Artists
A few weeks ago in my post Disrupt the engine market | Autodesk’s bananas I mentioned that Autodesk was getting into the IaaS (infrastructure as a service) business to reduce the IT barrier to entry of large scale film production.
Last week Side Effects Software, makers of Houdini, opened up their cloud rendering solution to Beta testers. It uses the Amazon EC2 platform so Side Effects has harnessed cloud computing for its platform without even taking on the hardware back end risk. Smart.
“The cloud offers a cost effective way of expanding your processing power without impacting your current IT infrastructure,” says Paul Salvini, CTO, Side Effects Software. “Render farms often sit idle because they need to be ready for peak demand. With the cloud, you only pay for what you use and this creates a much more scalable back end”
via Side Effects Software Inc.
Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) is a web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.
via Amazon EC2
