Hi everybody!
I am not a graphics artist, but a software developer from Germany and I would like to introduce to you a project that I have been working on in my spare time since last year, based on an idea I had in 2011. I humbly think it could be very useful for the Blender community, so it is important for me to involve you as early as possible.
The project is called BitWrk and it is supposed to be an open marketplace for computing power. It works like a stock exchange. There are buyers and sellers, but not for stocks: for computing tasks. Everybody can be a buyer, or a seller. Using Bitcoin as currency, this can be accomplished as a real community project.
Translated to Blender, this means that rendering times can be reduced drastically by harnessing the power of the internet, for a very small price, without registration, and on a per-use basis. It also means that everybody can refinance their expensive computers by providing rendering service to others - for money. It doesn’t stop at Blender rendering, there is other software that can profit from huge amounts of computing power. But Blender is my primary use case.
The screenshot shows Blender dispatching a rendering job tile by tile to the BitWrk service.
BitWrk is currently not as easy to use as I would like it to be. I apologize for that and I’ll be enhancing it every day. Still, it is important for me to get your feedback in this phase!
The software is still in heavy development, but it is working already, and it is completely Open Source. There is no payment processing yet, so no actual money can be made or lost. Only Cycles Rendering is supported at the moment. Please see the homepage for information on how to get you started.
Please have a look at http://bitwrk.net! And, if you actually happen to like the project, please support it by donating some spare CPU cycles, making the experience for new users so much better!
I happily support everybody who would like to try out BitWrk.
Cheers,
Jonas