AzureRender: A Cloud-Based Parallel and Distributed Rendering System

Generally, image rendering requires high computing capacity. It is really time consuming to render a movie on a single machine. The use of multiple machines to render a move requires much effort to control the workflow and data. With the emergence of cloud computing, more and more scientists and engineers are moving their tasks from laboratories to public clouds. This migration requires some sort experience on both the cloud architecture and coding in the cloud. This paper proposes a simple service to render movies on Microsoft Azure that accelerates movie rendering. This service, called AzureRender, also introduces task parallelism and cache management to improve performance and reduce cost. A comparative study on image rendering performance and cost between Microsoft Azure and desktop machines is given at the end of the paper.