A failure to communicate...

I look at a lot of grid/cluster/render farm services. I haven't seen a lot of big success stories on the media and entertainment front, for a number of reasons:

- Bandwidth: render jobs have relatively large input/output files, and the cost of moving the files back and forth can be relatively high, compared to the cost of computation.
- Security: most studios are very concerned about leaks of imagery or data; interestingly, I've heard of large studios that farm out work to smaller boutique studios - who then farm their renders out to render services...
- Cost: Visual FX comanies tend to be much more sensitive than other industries (why that's so will have to be the topic of another post); "grid" services that charge an $1/CPU-hour (bought in bulk, in advance) are prohibitively expensive.
- Lack of persistent storage: It's not efficient to upload separate copies of shared source files (referenced geometry and textures) for every render. Shared persistent storage is the optimal solution, but it's not available with all grid services - and when it is, there's an additional cost.
- Application licenses, and proprietary code: the cost of 3rd-party apps (e.g. Maya, Mental Ray, Renderman) frequently exceeds the cost of the hardware it runs on, the license EULAs for these apps usually prohibit any kind of rental or service usage, and there's no persistent connection (e.g. VPN) to share local licenses. Also, advanced render pipelines almost always include proprietary, site-specific code, which presents a similar problem.

Amazon's EC2 service may be the exception - the issue of application licenses remains, but Amazon's S3 storage service solves most of the storage issues. If Amazon could provide some kind of persistent VPN connection, we'd be set. Their costs (currently 10 cents per CPU-hour for computation, and 15 cents per GB/month of storage) are much more competitive; the transfer costs for S3 (10 cents per GB uploaded, 13-18 cents per GB downloaded) are more porblematic, but at least it's getting closer.

A bigger question is, what does this mean for the business models for storage, servers, and application software? In the short term, nothing. In the longer term, I think this is a business model that will have to be addressed...