Sheep it! - golemfactory/golem-rd GitHub Wiki

Sheep it! is a free distributed render farm for Blender. Users share their spare computing power and gain "credits" for each computed task. When ordering a frame, the requester must pay credits to the workers.

Website

Main problems:

  • requester's files can be easily viewed by a worker, no security mechanisms are included
  • there are averagely 250 machines connected to the network, which is not enough. Also very few powerful machines are involved - it's impossible to render more demanding projects
  • single subtask shouldn't require more than 20 minutes of computation (on a quadcore machine), otherwise it can be banned. An automated system for banning such tasks exists, but doesn't work well; users can't report these projects - considering above, too demanding projects usually don't get banned and they block the network for hours. On the other hand, it's still possible for a project to get banned, so theoretically a user can't render a project requiring more than 20 minutes of computation per subtask, which makes sheep it totally useless for bigger projects
  • a frame can be only split into 1, 4, 16 and 64 subtasks
  • credits are used not only for payments but also to set the order of waiting projects - the more credits the owner has, the higher in the queue her projects are. This is not always fair

Interesting forum posts/topics: