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Distributed Video Rendering using Blender, VirtualBox, and BOINC. Christopher J. Reynolds.

Distributed Video Rendering using Blender, VirtualBox, and BOINC. Christopher J. Reynolds. Centre for Parallel Computing, University of Westminster. Material:. The general concept and motivations. Choosing a system virtualization technology. Interactions with the hypervisor.

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Distributed Video Rendering using Blender, VirtualBox, and BOINC. Christopher J. Reynolds.

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  1. Distributed Video Rendering using Blender, VirtualBox, and BOINC. Christopher J. Reynolds. Centre for Parallel Computing, University of Westminster.

  2. Material: • The general concept and motivations. • Choosing a system virtualization technology. • Interactions with the hypervisor. • Final comments.

  3. Background: University of Westminster • Approx 1600 node Windows & BOINC based DG. • Runs applications from Enabling Desktop Grids for E-Science (EDGeS). • 20 node GPU cluster under construction to run further EDGeS/DEGISCO applications. • For most of 2009 we ran a public video/animation rendering service on a dedicated cluster (~256 Nodes).

  4. Blender: http://www.blender.org • Rastorization based rendering of frames; a Bag of Tasks (BoT). • Fits the DG model so move from cluster to DG. • Uses Blender, a well known animation/image rendering suite. • Q: What are Blender’s requirements? • A: Python. • Q: What other considerations are required for a public service? • A: Python scripts can be embedded within Blender input files (Security) • Q: How to address these issues? • A: Virtualization

  5. Existing Virtualization Solutions • Existing solutions use either process virtualization or system virtualization. • Process virtualization (using Entropia VM) proposed by Calder et al [1] is tied to Windows as the host OS. • VM Wrapper: Generic but more complex and incomplete (Windows Host Support). • Marosi et al described proof of concept using QEMU based on features [2] . • Q: QEMU/KQEMU now obsolete on Windows, so what next? • A: Look at latest feature set and choose something else for a Lightweight solution.

  6. QEMU/KQEMU vs VirtualBox

  7. Solution: A Lightweight VM Controller. Host/DG Node Disk image (guest OS), VM config file, inputs. DG (BOINC) Server 1 BOINC Core Client 6 2 Start Transfer outputs VM Controller (standard BOINC job) 3 React to messages: suspend, resume, abort Transfer outputs Instantiate VM and transfer inputs 5 4 VBox Hypervisor VM (Guest)

  8. VirtualBox Hypervisor/Monitor Control VM Controller (C++ Boinc application) • Win32 CreateProcess() or fork() to VboxManagecmdln tool. • COM preferable. (COM)

  9. VM Controller VM Controller (C++ Boinc application) • Two Threads. • Worker launches unzipper (lzma), prepares VM config files, creates I/O shared directories, polls for Job completion. • Monitor thread deals with messages and VM control.

  10. Worker Thread

  11. Monitor Thread

  12. VM Worker Script: Blender echo 15 > /proc/$$/oom_adj echo "Setting oom_adj to 15 for PID=$$" case "$1" in start) mkdir /mnt/share mount -t vboxsf Shared /mnt/share mkdir /mnt/share/Outputs swapon /dev/sda swapon /dev/sdb START_FRAME=`cat /mnt/share/input.txt | head -1 ` END_FRAME=`cat /mnt/share/input.txt | head -2 |tail -1 ` sudo –u blender_user sh -c "blender -b /mnt/share/input.blend -o /mnt/share/Outputs/Frame-# -F PNG -x 0 -s $START_FRAME -e $END_FRAME –a” echo $? > /mnt/share/Outputs/blender_return.log echo "Finished Rendering Application" ;;

  13. Further Comments • We adhere to the “one VM per Workunit” model. • Our BOINC user account has restricted permissions. • This means VirtualBox.xml and MachineDefinition.xml are loaded from C:\Windows\system32\config\systemprofile\.VirtualBox • Single xml file location restricts us to one WU per node. • Proof of concept, though proposed roll out soon (late 2010).

  14. References • [1] Calder, B., Chien, A., & Yang, J. W. D. (2005). The entropia virtual machine for desktop grids. In VEE ’05: Proceedings of the 1st ACM/USENIX international conference on Virtual execution environments (pp. 186–196). • [2] Marosi, A., Kacsuk, P., Fedak, G., & Lodygensky, O. (2010). Sandboxing for Desktop Grids using Virtualization. In The 18th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Computing. • [3] P. Domingues and F. Araujo and L. Silva. (2009) Evaluating the performance and intrusiveness of virtual machines for desktop grid computing. In IPDPS '09: Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Parallel & Distributed Processing. • Questions?

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