Grid or Clustur Computing Build

Question

I have a Local Area Network LAN with a Domain Name.

Connected to this LAN around 50 Workstation.

One department uses After Effect Encoder. It takes long time to render videos (5 to 7 Hours)

The point of the question is: Can I build a Grid/Cluster/Cloud computing out of my current available resources. so that all Workstations work as a one computer to do some task in a faster way?

How to do this? What Software do I need?

Please Advice.

Is there some online tutorial or software name or freeware...etc.

Thank you

Answer 1

To allow a program or task work effectively over multiple computers the program or task generally needs to be designed with knowledge of such a set up. A regular program will not know how to leverage the network of computers and, while you could build an OS which would hide this from the program, this is hard and you may not get the speed increase you are looking for (may even get a decrease if the scheduling and communication overhead is too high or the task not easily 'parallelizable').

Luckily in your case, Adobe After Effect is designed to leverage multiple computers - there is documentation on the Adobe website:

• https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/automated-rendering-network-rendering.html#network_rendering_with_watch_folders_and_render_engines

And some tutorials on the web including this video overview which looks like a really nice introduction:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaCogkquNv4

You should not need any additional Grid, Cluster or Cloud computing software behind the regular networking connecting the computers - note that the recommendation seems to be for GigE connectivity, which would make sense given the large size of video files typically.