Project idea

[tvasconcelos]

Hi, been having an idea and i want to have your opinion.
Imagine i want to render a 3D image, a very large scene. Can i use, in the way a bitcoin pool uses processing power for hashing, the same processing power to render that image, or animation? I mean, not having to give the scene to everybody who helps render, just use processing power in a cluster/cloud kind of thing? Like fold at home works i think.

My idea is, with the ASIC coming, most GPU miners will be out of business, me included. Can that processing power be redirected to other areas? And get payed for the work they do? Not exactly mining for BTC but can receive is coins just the same for example.

It would have a server with a queue manager to receive and organize artists submitted work and then chunk it and distribute to "render nodes" a.k.a the miners. The server would then know how much work everyone did and pay accordingly.

Is this possible?   

[Sukrim]

You can develop a Bitcoin payment module to http://burp.renderfarming.net/.

[tvasconcelos]

Well, i know BURP. The thing is, BURP isn't a payed service, at least i think it's not. From where would you pay users? My goal was to do something like BURP but in a commercial style. A renderfarm. Where people could submit their work, and the farm renders it for them in exchange for a fee. Witch then was distributed to the workers. Much like a pool does, it works on the block with the miners power and distributes the profit.
A renderfarm, with the GPU/CPU miners, that like me are being put out of business by the ASICs.

I've looked into BOINC, but it sends the worker a bunch of files for it to work on. My idea was, if possible (i'm not a developer), to bypass the download of sometimes massive data (textures, files, images, apps, etc...) and just use processing power over the wan. When you render an image, it gets chunked into buckets, like the block is chunked, and for example on a dual core cpu you get 2 buckets rendered at a time. If you had 10.000 cpus you'd have the ability to render 20.000 buckets at a time. Not that the image would be chunked that much, but it serves the example. If you had an animation, instead you render a frame at a time you could make that each worker renders 1 frame. Well it's a renderfarm, not much to explain...

Just wanted to know if it was possible...

[killerstorm]

Just wanted to know if it was possible...

Yes, theoretically possible, but not as easy as mining because rendering requires a lot of data to be transfered.

Another problem is that it is possible to check whether hashing work is honest, but it isn't possible to check whether rendering work is honest.

Perhaps somebody can develop a rendering algorithm which isn't that much data-intensive. Say, in theory, it's easier to distribute voxel rendering work, but voxels kinda suck, nobody uses them.

[Sukrim]

Ok, to render with modern algorithms you tyypically need the whole scene, no matter if you render only a single pixel, a 64x64 bucket or a 4k frame.

Just hold your fingers like a square in front of you (away from the screen) - probably you still can see indirect light from the sun that might even be hidden behind clouds. Similar a lot of things that are hidden by your fingers still influence the "bucket" that you see (shadows, reflections...).
Similar to this, even if you only render a small part of a scene, you need to consider a lot of objects that are not visible --> you need to transmit a lot of data.

You described how render farms work quite well (splitting into frames and letting each node work on them alone), still this usually requires so much data that most render farms work in a LAN and have big storage servers in the backend for large textures etc.

Another issue is that you need to give out things you might not want the person rendering the frame to know (e.g. a frame for the upcoming 2nd Hobbit movie). Homomorphic encryption is not that far yet, but might work out in the future for even more general services (then you just load a blob of data, process it and send it back without ever knowing what you actually did)

A commercial platform using BURP as far as I know:
http://www.renderfarm.fi/

[tvasconcelos]

Thanks for your replies.

What i was aiming for was to override that data transfer. The server would hold all the data and just use nodes processing power.
@killerstorm, what do you mean about honesty?

@sukrim, ok, i thought that you could just harvest processor power. The goal was to bypass that letting go of sensitive data, that in a commercial renderfarm is guaranteed. they are the ones that host the files and render them "in house", and take responsibility for it. encrypting the data beeing rendered would be a way to go. But as i said i'm not a developer and know nothing about what goes behind the render button. I just press it and waaaaaaaaiiiiiitttttttt!!! i'm guessing you know what i mean!

I'll check that homomorphic thingy you said. I may not be an expert in anything, but i like to be informed.
BTW, i already checked renderfarm.fi, but thanks anyway.

[killerstorm]

How do you know whether a fragment of a picture is correctly rendered?

Suppose I don't even have a GPU, but I love money, so I will get rendering job, but will submit just some black pixels.

How do you detect a fraud like that?

What if I will modify software to do a cheap inaccurate rendering, and thus get an ability to render 100x more images than my GPU allows.

That would give me 100x more profit.

[tvasconcelos]

BOINC uses replication and validation.

[Sukrim]

Also one can use perceptual hashes to verify that your frame actually looks similar to the picture before and after or to a low-res solution.