My long-time friend, Michael Duffy of Axceleon
introduced me to a new product, CloudFuzion, which is a new use of the
company's EnFuzion product. It appears to be an interesting tool for
those deploying technical or high performance computing applications who
also need the flexibility and agility of cloud computing. The
company's first target is moving digital content rendering farms into
Amazon's EC2 environment.
What is EnFuzion?
EnFuzion is a job scheduler and resource manager for compute grids, clusters and render farms. EnFuzion combines pools of servers and desktop machines to enable faster execution through distribution of jobs. EnFuzion reduces the complexity of distributed computing involving many machines in heterogeneous environments, thereby maximizing resource utilization with minimum user involvement. EnFuzion manages files, machines and network, freeing users to problem solving and has full redundancy and automatic fail over capabilities designed in since it’s inception.
It came out of work done by TurboLinux years ago and is installed all over the world.
What is CloudFuzion?
CloudFuzion™ with EC2 provides “elastic rendering™” within the cloud and changes the economics of rendering by allowing studios and end users to pay only for their usage. This notion of “elastic renderingTM” using CloudFuzion™ decreases the management of the hardware and software stockpile in a studio environment. The CloudFuzion™ render farm in the cloud can shrink and expand on demand. It can start with one or two render nodes and then rapidly expand to thousands of render nodes transparently increasing the potential of the render farm within minutes using Amazon EC2.
Snapshot analysis
CloudFuzion appears to offer a number of useful features for those engaged in technical or high performance compting. While Axceleon appears focused on helping creators of digital content, it would be equally useful to those doing financial modeling, architectural design testing, non-districtive testing for manufacturing firms and a number of other applications.
While Amazon's EC2 is the platform Axceleon is supporting today, it is rather likely that other major infrastructure as a service providers' products could be supported in the future.
While
Axceleon's focus is rather narrow today, it is likely that many other
market segments would find the capabilities of both EnFuzion and
CloudFuzion very useful.