French start-up offers new take on rendering
July 20, 2016

French start-up offers new take on rendering

PARIS, FRANCE — It is well known that rendering can be expensive, time-consuming and energy-hungry. During SIGGRAPH 2016, the French startup Qarnot (Qarnot.com) will present a new render farm that is around 4x cheaper than comparable solutions and producing 75 percent less carbon footprint.

When the Norwegian studio Fabelfjord looked for rendering options for their movie Dunder, an original story based on a popular book universe, they had budget and time constraints. Qarnot attracted their attention. Based in the south of Paris, Qarnot offers a cloud-based online rendering service running on a distributed render farm. With a price of $0.25 per CPU per hour, Qarnot fit their budget and allowed them to meet their deadlines.

"The interface was practical and easy to use,” says Merete Korsberg, Fabelfjord, CEO and producer of the film. “Qarnot’s excellent service and support made a great contribution to the production at a crucial stage.” 

But for Endre Lund Eriksen, author of the book, scriptwriter and associate producer, the highlight was Qarnot’s disruptive and green innovation. Qarnot is re-thinking data centers by breaking up the collection of servers previously centralized in energy-hungry facilities, and installs them into buildings in the form of Q.rad digital heaters. By avoiding data center costs related to infrastructure, maintenance and cooling, Qarnot produces 75 percent less of a carbon footprint.

The service is based on two innovations: the Q.ware software distribution platform and the Q.rad digital heater. The Q.rad is the first connected digital heater using embedded computing processors as a heat source. Completely silent, it gets its computing instructions through the Internet. Processing workloads provides free and efficient heating for all types of premises. The Q.ware distributes computing workloads securely and efficiently on the Q.rad digital heater farm, according to the host’s needs for heat and computing workload constraints. 

Qarnot’s farm counts 5,000 cores in Paris, hosted in a hundred homes in Paris. Every new user can test the platform with 25 free CPU hours.