Render farm

A render farm is a high-performance computer system, e.g. a computer cluster, built to render computer-generated imagery (CGI), typically for film and television visual effects.

The term render farm was born during the production of the Autodesk 3D Studio animated short The Bored Room in July 1990 when, to meet an unrealistic deadline, a room filled with Compaq 386 computers was configured to do the rendering. At the time the system wasn't networked so each computer had to be set up by hand to render a specific animation sequence. The rendered images would then be 'harvested' via a rolling platform to a large-format optical storage drive, then loaded frame by frame to a Sony CRV disc.

The Autodesk technician assigned to manage this early render farm (Jamie Clay) had a regular habit of wearing farmer's overalls and the product manager for the software (Bob Bennett) joked that what Clay was doing was farming the frames and at that moment he named the collection of computers a render farm.

In the second release of the software, Autodesk introduced network rendering, making the task of running a render farm significantly easier. A BTS of the Bored Room doesn't show Clay in the overalls but does give a glimpse of the production environment.

A render farm is different from a render wall, which is a networked, tiled display used for real-time rendering. The rendering of images is a highly parallelizable activity, as frames and sometimes tiles can be calculated independently of the others, with the main communication between processors being the upload of the initial source material, such as models and textures, and the download of the finished images.

Over the decades, advances in computer capability have allowed an image to take less time to render. However, the increased computation is appropriated to meet demands to achieve state-of-the-art image quality. While simple images can be produced rapidly, more realistic and complicated higher-resolution images can now be produced in more reasonable amounts of time. The time spent producing images can be limited by production time-lines and deadlines, and the desire to create high-quality work drives the need for increased computing power, rather than simply wanting the same images created faster.

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Wikipedia