An Experimental Implementation of a Resilient Graphic Rendering Cluster

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the challenge of developing a web front that will give an interactive and relatively immediate result without the overhead of complex grid scheduling, in the sense of the grid’s lack of interactivity and need for certificates that users simply do not own. In particular, the local system of issuing grid certificates is somewhat limited to a narrower community compared to that which we wanted to reach in order to popularize the grid, and our desired level of service availability exceeded the use of the cluster for grid purposes. Therefore, we have developed an interactive, scalable web front and back-end animation rendering frame dispatcher to access our cluster’s rendering power with low latency, low overhead and low performance penalty added to the cost of Persistence of Vision Ray rendering. The system is designed to survive temporary or catastrophic failures such as temporary power loss, load shedding, malfunction of rendering server cluster or client hardware, whether through an automatic or a manual restart, as long as the hardware that keeps the previous work and periodically dumped state of the automata is preserved.