R e n d e r . F a r m s

A render farm is a network of CPUs for rendering animation frames. They may or may not be controlled by a software application like SuperConductor. It comes in handy when a client wants 10 minutes of broadcast quality animation and you realize that it will take your 3 machines 250 days to render it. A couple of VNS consultants (myself and Adam Hauldren) offer render farm services.

Amazon EC2

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) offers a possible solution to render farm needs. However, the user is responsible for configuration and the monitoring of output. This is not a problem if you plan ahead, organize workflow, and run a test farm. But chances are you won't have time to do this and will be stuck with a deadline looming and not enough CPU cycles. Existing render farm options appear to be more cost effective.