Explain briefly how Aneka is used for Maya Rendering

Aneka is a market oriented Cloud development and management platform with rapid application
development and workload distribution capabilities. Aneka is an integrated middleware package
which allows you to seamlessly build and manage an interconnected network in addition to
accelerating development, deployment and management of distributed applications using
Microsoft .NET frameworks on these networks. It is market oriented since it allows you to build,
schedule, provision and monitor results using pricing, accounting, QoS/SLA
services in private and/or public (leased) network environments.

For 3D Rendering, Aneka enables you to complete your jobs in a fraction of the usual time using existing
office computers without having to do any programming.
Some of the key advantages of Aneka over other GRID or Cluster based workload distribution solutions
include:
• rapid deployment tools and framework,
• ability to harness multiple virtual and/or physical machines for accelerating application result
• provisioning based on QoS/SLA
• support of multiple programming and application environments
• simultaneous support of multiple run-time environments
• built on-top of .NET, with support for Linux environments

Build
Aneka includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) which
includes a combination of APIs and Tools to enable you to
express your application. This enables you to complete your
3D rendering job in a fraction of the usual time using existing
office computers without any programming.

Accelerate
Aneka supports Rapid Development and Deployment of
Applications in Multiple Run-Time environments. Aneka uses
physical machines as much as possible to achieve maximum
utilization in local environment.

Manage
For Management of Rendering, we provide a custom
Graphical User Interface (GUI) providing ability to set various
Maya rendering (batch mode) parameters which generates
Aneka tasks. The GUI also monitors submitted Aneka tasks
and collects the final rendered image.
BUILD

Aneka includes a Software Development Kit (SDK) which includes a

combination of APIs and Tools to enable you to express your application.
This enables you to complete your 3D rendering job in a fraction of the usual
time using existing office computers without having to do any programming.

For building solution to accelerate 3D rendering, you can use Aneka’s Design
Explorer tool. The Design Explorer uses parameter sweep to express the rendering job over
multiple computers without having to do any programming.
The Design Explorer takes existing applications like 3D Rendering and sends different
parameter sets provided by Maya in form of command line to produce multiple distributed
executions on the same application.

The Design Explorer is a visual environment that helps users to quickly create parameter
sweeping applications and run it in few steps. More precisely, the Design Explorer provides a
wizard allowing users to:
• Identify the executable required to run the application;
• Define the parameters that control application execution and their domains;
• Provide the required input files for running the application;
• Define all the output files that will be produced by the application and made available to
the user;
• Define the sequence of commands that compose the task template that will be run
remotely;

The Aneka SDK includes some ready to use task classes that provide the basic operations for
composing the task template: execute an application, copy, rename, and delete a file. It also
provides an interface that allows developers to create task classes supporting parameter
sweeping.

Once the template is complete, the Design Explorer allows the user to directly run it on Aneka
Clouds by using the parameter sweeping APIs. Different visualizations are provided and
statistics collected by the environment in order to monitor the progress of the application.

The single solution developed using the Design Explorer can be run on different types of
Run time environments like
- PC Grids (also called Enterprise Grids)
- Data Centers (Clusters)
- MultiCore Computers
- Public and/or private networks
- Virtual Machine or Physical
ACCELERATE

Aneka supports Rapid Development and Deployment of Applications in

Multiple Run-Time environments. Aneka uses physical machines as much
as possible to achieve maximum utilization in local environment. As
demand increases, Aneka provisions VMs via private clouds (Xen or
VMWare) or Public Clouds (Amazon).

For Accelerating 3D Rendering results, Aneka speeds development, deployment

and execution time by hiding away the complexity and making it easy.

How we accelerate Development and Deployment:

1) Rapid Deployment includes support of Parameter Sweep using Design Explorer Tool.
Parameter sweep takes existing applications that are controlled by a set of parameters
passed as a command line and produces multiple distributed executions of the same
application with different parameter sets.

2) Building on-top of .NET allows multiple programming languages to be supported,

thereby making it faster to get existing applications running.

3) Develop Application once and run in multiple environments simultaneously. Support

for Multiple Run-time environments saves you time in programming your applications.
Aneka supports Virtual Machine and Physical hardware in private and public networks.

4) Optimized for networked multi-core computers, Aneka effectively virtualizes your

application which allows you to harness the power of multiple computers for the same
workload. This gives you results in near real-time allowing you to make faster
decisions.

5) Aneka Scheduler allows you to run multiple applications on same Run-time

environment either concurrently (simultaneously) or in a queue arrangement.
MANAGE

Management includes Graphical User Interface (GUI) and APIs to set-up,

monitor, manage and maintain remote and global Aneka compute clouds.
Aneka also has an accounting mechanism and manages priorities and
scalability based on SLA/QoS which enables dynamic provisioning.

For Management of Rendering, we provide a custom Graphical User Interface (GUI)

providing ability to set various Maya rendering (batch mode) parameters which generates
Aneka tasks. The GUI also monitors submitted Aneka tasks and collects the final rendered
image.

The Aneka Management Studio also assists with the following:

• Quick setup of computing clouds;
• Remote installation and configuration of nodes;
• Remote control of containers;
• System load monitoring and tuning.
• Monitor aggregate dynamic statistics and probing individual nodes for CPU and memory
load
• Extensible framework – add new features and services by implementing management
plug-ins

Other management features include:

• Accounting and Pricing services provide flexible pricing strategies and keeping track of
applications, reservations and users.
• Dynamic Capacity Management – provisioning to elastically scale up and down
according to application requirements.
• Service Oriented allowing discovery of services and available nodes
• Automatic overflow and Failover giving high availability based on SLA

Aneka is a platform and a framework for developing distributed applications on the Cloud.
ANEKA ARCHITECTURE
It harnesses the spare CPU cycles of a heterogeneous
network of desktop PCs and servers or data centers on demand. Aneka provides developers with
a rich set of APIs for transparently exploiting such resources and expressing the business logic
of applications by using the preferred programming abstractions. System administrators can
leverage on a collection of tools to monitor and control the deployed infrastructure. This can be
a public cloud available to anyone through the Internet, or a private cloud constituted by a set
of nodes with restricted access.

The Aneka based computing cloud is a collection of physical and virtualized resources
connected through a network, which are either the Internet or a private intranet. Each of these
resources hosts an instance of the Aneka
Container representing the runtime
environment where the distributed
applications are executed. The container
provides the basic management features of
the single node and leverages all the other
operations on the services that it is hosting.
The services are broken up into fabric,
foundation, and execution services. Fabric
services directly interact with the node
through the Platform Abstraction Layer (PAL)
and perform hardware profiling and dynamic
resource provisioning. Foundation services
identify the core system of the Aneka
middleware, providing a set of basic features
to enable Aneka containers to perform
specialized and specific sets of tasks.
Execution services directly deal with the
scheduling and execution of applications in
the Cloud.

One of the key features of Aneka is the

ability of providing different ways for Figure 1. Overview of Aneka Framework
expressing distributed applications by
offering different programming models;

execution services are mostly concerned with providing the middleware with an implementation
for these models. Additional services such as persistence and security are transversal to the
entire stack of services that are hosted by the Container. At the application level, a set of
different components and tools are provided to: 1) simplify the development of applications
(SDK); 2) porting existing applications to the Cloud; and 3) monitoring and managing the Aneka
Cloud.

A common deployment for 3D Rendering is presented in Figure 2.

ANEKA ARCHITECTURE
An Aneka based Cloud is constituted by a set of
interconnected resources that are dynamically modified according to the user needs by using
resource virtualization or by harnessing the spare CPU cycles of desktop machines. If the
deployment identifies a private Cloud all the resources are in house, for example within the
enterprise. This deployment is extended by adding publicly available resources on demand or
by interacting with other Aneka public clouds providing computing resources connected over
the Internet.

Figure 2