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Distributed Rendering Environment supports classes and TeraGrid partners

Rendering the frames in a complex animation can tie up a workstation, or a whole lab of them in a computer graphics class setting, for literally days or weeks, says Purdue Professor Gary Bertoline. But if the load could be shared among hundreds, even thousands, of machines, a job that takes, say, 1,000 seconds on one might be done in a second — give or take a few ticks of the clock for latency and overhead.

Enter the Distributed Rendering Environment, or DRE, developed at Purdue and now available to users of the TeraGrid through TeraDRE. Like Purdue's DRE before it, TeraDRE draws on the Purdue Condor pool, a system for managing and sharing unused compute time on more than 7,000 linked computers on campus. Eventually, the idea is to incorporate computing resources from partners around the country connected through the TeraGrid, the world's largest open science computing network, said Bertoline, distinguished professor of computer graphics and founding director of Purdue's Envision Center for Data Perceptualization.

“Now when you press the render button, you have a huge pool of resources out there,” Bertoline said. “We've got this working quite well here. It's being used in classes on a regular basis. We're working on taking it to a national level.”

He said Purdue, which decided to revise the DRE system for grid use after it became a TeraGrid partner in 2003, already has a TeraDRE resource-sharing partnership with its Calumet campus in Northwest Indiana and with the University of Notre Dame.

“We’re in discussions with a number of universities around the country that have an interest in this,” Bertoline said.

TeraDRE works with popular 3-D modeling, animation, effects and rendering software such as Maya and open-source Blender. Laura Arns, associate director and research scientist at the Envision Center, said the list should continue to expand. Arns said Purdue also is refining the system to make it more aware of connected computers with special graphics-handling capability, so it can focus jobs on those automatically where possible. Another goal is refining the TeraDRE interface for better ease of use by users often more artistically than computationally centered.

DRE and TeraDRE have become staples in the courses from Purdue’s Computer Graphics Technology Department in particular. Bertoline said the system allows instructors to present students with more challenging assignments without fear of the rendering bottleneck that led to its development in the first place.

“It’s a great resource to have this DRE on campus,” said Purdue Professor Nicoletta Adamo-Villani.

She and her students use the DRE system in computer graphics technology courses that, among other things, are creating a highly graphical educational computer game, called Nano Factor, designed to teach junior high-school students about micro and nano technologies.

They’re developing the game in collaboration with Educate for Tomorrow (EforT) and its NanoWise Project. The Hawaii company develops educational materials, games among them, to advance student achievement in science, math, engineering and technology — or STEM — education areas. Nano Factor could be out at the end of 2009, Adamo-Villani said.

“The goal is to distribute this to schools,” she said.

Most recently, the assistant professor of computer graphics technology used TeraDRE to create a virtual rendition of a proposed satellite city for housing Istanbul residents in the event of a catastrophic Earthquake, a project with colleague Mete Sozen, Purdue's Kettelhut Distinguished Professor of Structural Engineering.

Sozen, a Turkish native, led an international team to evaluate the earthquake risk facing Istanbul, which lies adjacent to the active North Anatolian Fault. The study in 2005 concluded that the city is at high risk for a major quake — 6.8 to 7.5 on the Richter scale — in the next 30 years. Many of the city’s buildings were constructed with no regard for earthquake mitigation or, frequently, no regard for modern building standards at all. The study concluded that it would cost $50 billion to bring the city up to modern standards to reduce quake effects.

Sozen had another idea: a satellite city, built from the start to be quake-resistant and housing, for instance, hotel, residential, business and entertainment districts that could serve as a refuge in the event of major earthquake damage to the old city. The five-minute animation, created in two months using the TeraGrid and TeraDRE, allowed Adamo-Villani and her team to bring what remains a concept to life.

Sozen said Turkish officials are considering the idea and may move ahead on site planning later this year. The extreme damage this spring from the earthquake in Chengdu and the Sichuan province of China, which Sozen visited after that quake, could add impetus to the Turkish project, he said.

Adamo-Villani, also an Envision Center research scientist, said students in her class who built an introductory movie for Nano Factor, which brings to mind the Oscar-winning feature Toy Story, ended up with jobs at Pixar, Toy Story's maker, and other major animation houses.

But the DRE system is employed for visualization in cutting-edge science as well, such as a look at how a virus lands on, attaches to and implants itself in a host, Arns noted for example. She said the load-sharing system allows scientists and other animators to refine what they're creating on the fly, too, without waiting hours, days or weeks.

The time, or lack thereof, it takes to get from idea to animation is the common thread, whether the project is a computer game, a fly-through of a virtual city or a look at the actions of the epsilon15 bacteriophage at a resolution of 4.5 angstroms. (A human hair is about 500,000 to a million angstroms in diameter by comparison.)

“The advantage is always speed,” Adamo-Villani said. “It's a great resource to have.”

Writer: Greg Kline, science and technology writer, ITaP, (765) 494-8167, gkline@purdue.edu

Last updated: Sept. 19, 2008