backburner Applications

The network rendering system consists of four interacting applications.

combustion and Render Queue

Use combustion and the stand-alone Render Queue application as render clients that submit combustion outputs to the backburner Manager.

backburner Manager

The backburner Manager application is the hub of the network rendering system. Jobs are submitted to the manager from any workstation on the render network using combustion or the stand-alone Render Queue application.

The manager breaks each submitted job into tasks and distributes the tasks to the servers. (To look at the progress of the tasks, use Monitor.)

Any workstation on the network with backburner installed can be designated as the manager.

Note: It is possible to have more than one manager on a network, although usually this is not necessary.

backburner Server

The backburner Server application runs on each render workstation on the network, and accepts commands from the manager to start and stop the rendering of specific tasks.

backburner Monitor

Use the backburner Monitor application to control jobs that the manager is processing. Submitted jobs can be started, suspended, reordered (by changing Priority), or removed from the queue. Using Monitor, you can also assign servers to specific render jobs in the queue, and create or break job dependencies.

Monitor can be started on any workstation on the network, and it can connect to any available manager.