BURP Distributed Rendering Project Enters Alpha

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The BURP project aims to provide a publicly accessible distributed renderfarm for Blender. It is built upon the BOINC software (the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing) which is now also used for projects such as Seti@Home.

If you’re running Windows or Linux you can download their client and join the Net. So far there’s still no OSX BURP client so I can’t join in the fun, unfortunately. (BOINC itself does support OSX, so if you want you can experiment with other projects).
As they’re still in alpha, certain restrictions apply:

  • Sessions will either be queued for rendering or rejected within 48 hours with at least 90% certainty
  • Downtime will be announced and scheduled (however, accidental unscheduled downtime may happen from time to time)
  • The system will pick out at most one session to render every hour

So, you can submit jobs but there’s no guarantee that they will be rendered.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this project and I’m really hoping they’ll make good progress in the near future. Being able to offer access to such a free renderfarm would be an awesome feature for Blender!

I do have a critical remark though: In the light of the recent discussion on Blender security, I do wonder how vulnerable this system is to attack. How easy is it to upload a .blend with an evil Python script?

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    • http://www.blenderversity.org BrianH

      *ooooh* can’t wait for the OSX client myself, all I got are mac’s.

    • nsnipe

      So what for are you waiting? There is working Boinc version for macs.

    • elbeem

      “I do have a critical remark though: In the light of the recent discussion on Blender security, I do wonder how vulnerable this system is to attack. How easy is it to upload a .blend with an evil Python script?”

      Is it possible to add an option within the Blender GUI to upload the project to BURP as an spesial filetype that does not include any scripts, or somehing?

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      @nsnipe: oh, I have BOINC installed, but there’s no BURP client for Macs yet.. I’ll edit the text to make that a bit clearer.

    • Thomas Braun

      …and what about people stea…. uhhmmm… “borrowing” other peoples .blend files…?
      ;-)

    • indigomonkey

      That’s all part of it – BURP .blend files are easily accessible, and intentionally so, so that people can learn from others.

      Dotsch has made Both MacOS and FreeBSD versions, available at http://www.dotsch.de/burp.

    • http://www.sprocketandlube.com Javawocky

      Here is a simple set of rules for BURP:
      If you are Pixar, don’t use BURP, unless you want to produce the second open source movie
      If you are doing commercial work, don’t use BURP – use Respower or some other excellent online renderer for a small fee.
      If you don’t want others to steel your cool model of the ginger bread man, Don’t use BURP.

      If you are doing something cool and don’t mind that other people can grab your blend file, use BURP
      If you have something to render and you want to crank every setting to the max and want to see it before you die, use BURP
      If you want to have lots of chicks, use BURP. Well not to sure about that last point.

      Point is this: Where else can you get hundreds of computers to render you ‘masterpiece’ for free? And if you really have a true ‘masterpiece’ which you plan to profit off, you probably have a little cash to use a commercial render farm.

      Do plug you computer into BURP to help rendering though, if you are not paranoid about security and work at a bank.

    • S-T-S

      I’m left wondering if there is actually any need for python scripts in projects that are rendered with BURP. I can’t think of any use for python for rendering stage only (please enlighten me)

      I asked the same question in BURP forums and Janus (main developer of BURP) was kind enough to answer. I think that there is quite good protection against malicious users at the moment and it is only getting better as the system matures.

      Read the BURP thread here: http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=775#5653

    • http://www.candointeractive.com/art Mal Duffin

      This sounds like a great project – I just installed it.

      One small thing – it states that the application being used is Blender 4.50!
      Mal

    • http://www.excellentWhale.com Joeri

      “I’m left wondering if there is actually any need for python scripts in projects”
      Sometimes python is used to position an object or to alter layers or to move verteces or to… (endless list)
      It might be a good idea to add a security entry in the user settings with a toggle button: “Python off” (in blender and in BURP)
      Most scenes will be shiny balls on checkerboards anyway, seeing that there is no way to secure your file from being used by others.

      “I think that there is quite good protection against malicious users at the moment ”
      Restricting access to the filesystem is a good idea. But python scripts can write python scripts, there is no way to have software detect if this creates malicious scripts. It can even write randomly evil scripts, making it total possible not to be detected by BURP administrators.

      “All sessions with obfuscated/unneeded/unclear python scripts are rejected”…
      Good idea,…

    • elbeem

      Joeri wrote: “Sometimes python is used to position an object or to alter layers or to move verteces or to… (endless list)”

      But after that is done, you don’t need Python for the rendering, do you? There is no need to allow python scripts running in the BURP system if it’s not needed for the rendering.

    • http://www.primegrid.com Rytis

      Blender 4.50 is the internal version of the code that enables blender to run under BOINC. The actual blender version is stated in the frontpage, on the left column (it’s 2.43).

    • http://www.blendernation.com Bart

      “All sessions with obfuscated/unneeded/unclear python scripts are rejected”

      How is this going to work? Is some Python genius going to manually check *every* python script for *every* .blend that is submitted? Sounds like an unrealistic solution to me..

      I like the ‘disable Python’ options that Joeri suggested. Of course, BURP doesn’t use your own Blender installation but installs its own, so I’m not sure how you can control that..

    • Clean3d

      Do all the .blends run through this system *have* to be open source? I know that people may have access to all the content, but could you simply include a license with each file that outlined how they could be used?

    • S-T-S

      @ Bart: “I like the ‘disable Python’ options that Joeri suggested. Of course, BURP doesn’t use your own Blender installation but installs its own, so I’m not sure how you can control that..”

      I think that it could be set to use BURP account settings, like now you can modify general preferences in your account settings. This should be done at server side anyways, because it would be useless for BURP servers to send projects that use python to clients that have disabled python.

      Then the drawback is that you would be then left out of projects that use python.

      I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage. Is it not possible to do everything without python? What would be the usages that absolutely require python (or usages that help in something tremendously)?

    • http://www.dotsch.de/burp Dotsch

      There are non offical BURP applications for MacOS Intel and FreeBSD (i386) available. The project admin has ackowledged to use this binaries in the project till he has build offical binaries :
      http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=531
      http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=32

    • http://www.dotsch.de/burp Dotsch

      Please have also a look at the “[FAQ] Portability – Mac” thread (http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=714) and the “[FAQ] Portability – *BSD, Solaris, AmigaOS, Irix…” thread (http://burp.boinc.dk/forum_thread.php?id=715) for more information about the porting activities.

    • http://www.andyk.de AndyK

      [quote]I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage. Is it not possible to do everything without python? What would be the usages that absolutely require python (or usages that help in something tremendously)?[/quote]

      I know one BURP rendersession which used python to control cameras for the animation… and it failed to render properly, because many windows clients (about 99%) don’t have python installed…

      AndyK

    • Micah

      oh wow I didn’t realize there were mac binaries!

    • http://www.nonakassenaar.nl Joeri

      “I still have no clue how to use python at RENDERING stage”

      I don’t think it’s used much, but in advanced rigging it can be a big help.
      I use expressions in all my maya files so I should think people could be using python as well.

      For instance, in a machine you can set all rotations of gears in speeds and counter speeds according to the first gear; this way you need to only animate the first gear and all the rest will follow, also after changes.
      Drivenkeys could (well should, blender does not have them yet) be driven by formulas. The wave modifier is all nice and stuff, but for better control you’d be using your own python wave generator. These are hard to bake, and why would you? The file would get very big for no real reason. We’ve also once used an external data file on positions of waver steppers in an ASML machine. No real need to bake IPO’s (unless you are using motion blur) out of them, just create an array, or read the file on render.

    • http://www.paulgaskin.com Paul

      I sure love blender :-)

    • http://www.andyk.de AndyK

      regarding the mentioned security issue in the article: http://www.blendernation.com/2007/04/24/blender-242-security-advisory/

      BURP already uses the 2.43 sources to build its client.
      So everyone who participate will get the new client automatically.