Improving the communication performance of distributed animation rendering using BitTorrent file system

Rendering is a crucial process in the production of computer generated animation movies. It executes a computer program to transform 3D models into series of still images, which will eventually be sequenced into a movie. Due to the size and complexity of 3D models, rendering process becomes a tedious, time-consuming and unproductive task on a single machine. Accordingly, animation rendering is commonly carried out in a distributed computing environment where numerous computers execute in parallel to speedup the rendering process. In accordance with distribution of computing, data dissemination to all computers also needs certain mechanisms which allow large 3D models to be efficiently moved to those distributed computers to ensure the reduction of time and cost in animation production. This paper presents and evaluates BitTorrent file system (BTFS) for improving the communication performance of distributed animation rendering. The BTFS provides an efficient, secure and transparent distributed file system which decouples the applications from complicated communication mechanism. By having data disseminated in a peer-to-peer manner and using local cache, rendering time can be reduced. Its performance comparison with a production-grade 3D animation favorably shows that the BTFS outperforms traditional distributed file systems by more than 3 times in our test configuration.