Tag Archives: Remote Desktop

Cinema4D Render Farm on R@CMon

Jon McCormack, an Associate Professor from Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University, creates high-resolution renderings of various subjects. His artworks have been showcased in leading galleries, museums and symposia.

Before the advent of the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud, Jon has been limited to running his render jobs to a couple of machines he can get his hands on in the faculty. After the first phase of the Monash node went online, the R@CMon team helped Jon in porting his rendering workflow in the NeCTAR Research Cloud environment. Jon uses Cinema4D for creating his high-resolution renders. Cinema4D runs on Windows and OS X so we’ve prepared a suitable Windows Server 2012 image for this purpose.

We assessed the performance of a NeCTAR guest running a rendering job. For this, we’ve used CINEBENCH from MAXON, a well known benchmarking tool to measure and compare CPU and graphics performance of various systems and platforms. The following video shows CINEBENCH running on a 16-core guest in the Monash node.

The CINEBENCH result showed that the guest performed well on the “Main Processor Performance (CPU)” component. Once GPUs become available in the second phase of the Monash node, we’ll be looking at running the second component of CINEBENCH which measures “Graphics Card Performance (GPU)”.

Cinema4D comes with a distributed rendering system which allows unlimited render clients connecting to a render server. The render server is where render jobs are submitted and is in charge of distributing it to the available render clients. NeCTAR guests have been provisioned to be render clients in Jon’s tenancy that talks to Jon’s render server running on a dedicate machine. Each render client renders a frame or a tile and submits the finished render back to the render server.

The following are some low-res renders from the “Image from Fifty Sisters, commission for the Ars Electronica Museum, Linz, Austria 2012/2013. Copyright Jon McCormack” project that Jon produced using his render farm in the NeCTAR Research Cloud.

Software Carpentry Bootcamp for Bioinformaticians (Adelaide/Melbourne) – UPDATE

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Last September 24-26 and October 1-3, the latest Software Carpentry Bootcamps were held in University of Adelaide and Monash University.

These Software Carpentry Bootcamps were designed for Bioinformaticians to enhance their knowledge and skills in programming and software development practices.The bootcamps were delivered using the NeCTAR Research Cloud where each trainee has been given dedicated access to a specific virtual workstation.

With the use of an automatic provisioning system, each virtual workstations have been preconfigured with the required tools, training materials and computing resources to perform the hands-on exercises.

On the first day of the bootcamp, the Software Carpentry instructors including the R@CMon team introduced the trainees to Python. The second day was mostly about software testing and documentation. The last day was when the trainees applied their knowledge from the previous sessions into collaborative group exercises.

Photos taken by Nathan Watson-Haigh (ACPFG).

“Thanks a lot for this information and also your kind efforts in running such a useful and informative workshop” – Fariborz Sobhanmanesh (Research Engineer, Bioinformatician with CSIRO Animal, Food and Health Sciences Centre)

“I recently attended the SWC bootcamp in Adelaide and found it incredibly useful. Sure there was a lot of information in a short amount of time but the topics covered were practical and very relevant to my daily work. Thanks must go to the presenters and organisers who kept things moving along brilliantly.” – Terry Bertozzi (Research Scientist with the South Australian Museum)

Using the NeCTAR Research Cloud for Delivering Hands-on Bioinformatics Training (Adelaide)

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A 1-day training workshop is scheduled for September 27, 2013 in Adelaide.

The training workshop aims to provide attendees relevant hands-on experience in using the NeCTAR Research Cloud for Bioinformatics.
The R@CMon team will be helping in the delivery of this workshop.

For more detailed information (contacts, venue, registration) on the training workshop, visit this BIG SA page.

Bioplatforms Australia – CSIRO NGS Workshop (July 9-12 2013)

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Last July 9-12 2013, Bioplatforms Australia and CSIRO conducted the latest NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) training workshop at Monash University.

This is the second NGS training workshop organised by Bioplatforms Australia that is held at Monash University since the very first, last year.
Using the same but improved tools and machine image from the very first workshop, the team provisioned virtual machines on the Monash node of the NeCTAR Research Cloud. See this announcement regarding the Monash node.

Bioplatforms Australia has conducted 7 NGS training workshops across Australia (Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra and Perth) with a total of 190 attendees in the last 12 months with 2 more workshops planned later this year.

Future Bioplatforms Australia workshops are listed on their website.

Bioplatforms Australia – CSIRO NGS Workshop (July 9-10 2012)

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We’ve successfully engaged Bioplatforms Australia and CSIRO in utilising the NeCTAR Research Cloud infrastructure to deliver next-generation sequencing workshops in Monash University and University of New South Wales last July 9-10, 2012.

We’ve created a custom cloud image which contains the relevant training materials, datasets and software stack.The image has been uploaded into the NeCTAR cloud and used to instantiate multiple virtual machines for the hands-on workshop. The same image has also been made available for download for participants to try locally on their local machines.

Automation tools that integrates provisioning of virtual machines, software stack installation, dataset preparation have been created for easy re-deployment of resources for various workshop sites around Australia.

A manuscript entitled “Next Generation Sequencing (NGS): A challenge to meet the increasing demand for training workshops in Australia” has been recently accepted for publication in Briefings in Bioinformatics.

This article can also be found, published created commons here ¹.