Computer graphic studios, render farms, render software developers

SONM can provide:

  • Unlimited resources for GPU rendering. Hundreds instances with 4-8 GPUs GPUs can be involved in rendering instantly.
  • Low, competing prices. For example, a PC with Nvidia Geforce 1070 GPU card will cost about 0.1 cent/OBh (OctaneBench per hour), comparing to minimal 0.5 cent/OBh on the market.
  • Strict security for customer's data. SONM partners are assessed for security and sign NDA with customers. All data transfers are encrypted using TLS and dedicated public key infrastructure (MVP protects only docker image transfer).
  • Compatibility with professional 3D drawing software, including 3D Studio Max, Autodesk Maya, Cinema 4D, Houdini and others.
  • Compatibility with render farm manager software, including Deadline, Afanasy, Qube!, SquidNet and others
  • Compatibility with Linux GPU renders, including Octane, V-Ray, RedShift and others.
  • Integration with cloud services for data storage (Amazon S3, Dropbox, etc.). There is also built-in p2p efficient data transfer component, optimized for multicast download (not implemented in MVP).
  • An infrastructure to build p2p rendering market. The rendering engine companies could consider implementing their own competitor to XRNDR (rendertoken.com) Octane project. SONM is a distributed blockchain backed computer resources market, providing a stable and matured platform for such kind of projects. It ensures payments, contracts, strong community, plenty of resource. Using SONM will require minimum or even no software modifications because of general purpose nature of SONM. SONM software engineers have huge experience in enterprise integration projects, minimising risks, costs and delivery time.

SONM limitations:

  • Can run only Linux, CPU resources in SONM are very limited, so we consider only Linux/GPU renderers. Traditional rendering uses CPU/Windows, it is standard de-facto for the last decades. Professional studios rare use GPU rendering, as the scenes are quite big and don't fit GPU memory (3-12 GB for common GPUs). Still, GPU and Linux rendering is evolving technology, it is reaching its maturity nowadays, some top-notch software developers provide Linux/GPU engines: Octane, V-Ray, RedShift. RedShift announced its ability to manage GPU memory efficiently, so that scene size can break memory limits. Besides it competes well with the most popular and professional renderer - Octane. So RedShift is the primary rendering engine we target to at the moment. But things can change later.
  • Render jobs need big amount of data to be downloaded to remote PCs to perform rendering. The expected size of professional scene is about 30 GB, or even 100 GB. SONM's resources are distributed across the world, their Internet connections can be poor, so it could make quite long time to download scene data and perform rendering. Still Internet connection speeds of some dedicated SONM partners are comparable to local network, reaching 10 Gbit/s. Besides, scene data are exactly the same for all PCs involved in rendering, so peer-to-peer content delivery technologies can solve the case. SONM will implement a BitTorrent-protocol based filesystem that can effectively distribute the files, prioritising the transfers to start the jobs immediately (not implemented in MVP). SONM nodes will exchange data with each other, increasing overall load speed. The more SONM nodes are involved in rendering, the more total transfer speed can be achieved, as SONM will automatically balance data exchanges to minimise download latencies.

Show case:

  • Install Deadline render farm manager on your own server, including MongoDB server and Samba
  • Install Deadline plugin to your 3D design software
  • Install SONM plugin to Deadline, configure it to use RedShift instance image
  • Install SONM client software
  • Check market prices, buy SNM tokens
  • Submit render job
  • Deadline plugin will automatically buy resources in SONM, provision instances to run RedShift
  • Deadline will split the job to start it on available SONM instances
  • Job is rendered on SONM resources
  • Deadline will gather rendering results, that become available to animator in 3D design software
  • Profit!