Advertisement

You're blocking ads, which pay for BlenderNation. Read about other ways to support us.

September Behind the Scenes Sponsor: Qarnot Computing

1

We’re happy to announce that Qarnot Computing is sponsoring our Behind the Scenes series this month. With Qarnot’s help, we can continue to interview the best Blender artists, providing space for them to share their work and knowledge with the Blender community.

Qarnot Computing provides a unique and smart approach to cloud computing by using the heat of their systems to heat homes and warehouses. They have been active in the Blender community for several years, sponsoring Cosmos Laundromat and giving presentations at the Blender Conference.

What is series sponsorship? Series sponsors provide the financial resources to allow our editorial team to focus on in-depth stories that matter to BlenderNation readers. Sponsors do not have control over the stories themselves—they simply help make them possible, which is so important and contributes to the Blender community. If you or your company is interested in sponsoring some of our original content, contact us.

What if rendering your images could have a positive impact?

Qarnot Computing is a sustainable cloud rendering solution provider. You can submit your scenes as easily as on any other farm with 3 major differences: you reduce the carbon footprint of your renderings by almost 100%, you heat homes for free (the electricity bill gets reimbursed)… and it’s up to 4 times cheaper than other cloud providers.

How is it possible? Unlike traditional data centers that gather thousands of computers that require a lot of space and massive cooling systems, Qarnot Computing’s infrastructure is decentralised. Thanks to a unique cutting-edge technology, processors are embedded in heaters and boilers. Thus the heat of the rendering is no longer wasted but reused and provided for free in the homes and warehouses where our computers are deployed.

Qarnot's infrastructure is composed of heaters, boilers and green computing clusters

Qarnot Computing has developed the application layer that distributes the renderings where the heat or hot water are required. To give an idea of how it works, rendering a medium-quality, 90-minute animated movie could heat an average French home for just over 46 years, or the whole city of Paris for 16 minutes during the coldest time of the year!

The infrastructure is totally secure and can be deployed very quickly at a very large scale, if needed. Thanks to a strategic partnership with AMD, the heaters, boilers, and servers of Qarnot’s green computing clusters are equipped with Ryzen or ThreadRipper processors.

Qarnot’s commitment to the Open-source community

Qarnot primarily focuses on open-source applications for each computing sector (machine learning, AI, fluid dynamics, molecular docking... and, of course, 3D). Because of their great potential and inspiring communities, they are in line with Qarnot’s philosophy. Recently, Qarnot’s commitment to community led them to become the biggest French contributor and one of Europe’s biggest contributors to the Folding@Home project to fight Covid-19. Additionally, a few years back, Qarnot Computing supported the rendering of Cosmos Laundromat.

Want to learn more about Qarnot?

Qarnot’s multi-disciplinary team of engineers explores new use cases and tools for high-performance computing and adapts solutions to their clients’ scientific, industrial, and research needs. 3D is no exception: specialists can help you make the most of the platform and build any custom pipeline upon request—or you can employ Qarnot’s simple and intuitive ready-to-use platform for Blender.

Learn more on https://render.qarnot.com

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

1 Comment

  1. What a great energy saving idea. If only Amazon would spend some of their billions and cover ALL their giant warehouse roofs in solar panels! :-(

Leave A Reply

To add a profile picture to your message, register your email address with Gravatar.com. To protect your email address, create an account on BlenderNation and log in when posting a message.

Advertisement

×