News archive

• 4 Jul 2010 13:06:30 UTC
  More transparent development
  Recently the project migrated to a new and more open development environment. It is now possible to follow the development and code changes up close by going to the development portal. The most recent development activity will also be made available on the front page of the project. This is one step in the direction of allowing the community to more easily contribute ideas, documentation and changes back into the BURP project. Later when the development platform has been properly phased in the current read-only status will be lifted and user creation will be made available for people interested in making contributions.

• 14 May 2010 15:24:16 UTC
  Unexpected downtime
  Today there was a weird smell of tuna in the server room and shortly after 14:35 UTC the main server suddenly went down. Quick tests showed that the 12V pin voltage on the PSU had dropped out of acceptable range. Half an hour later the system was back online with a new power supply installed. No data was lost during the incident and (since we aren't rendering anything right now) the impact on the service has been minimal.

• 1 Apr 2010 11:05:21 UTC
  Sold to NASA
  BURP has been sold to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (also known as NASA) for an undisclosed price. Deputy Administrator Dori Leth Barver explains:

  Recent budget cuts have made us re-evaluate the space program and focus on goals that are more easily achieved. When we cannot afford to send man and machine to the stars to gather video material we channel our resources into the next-best option: rendered imagery. Recent advance within the field of rendering technology has made it virtually impossible to determine the difference between the real world and the virtual world anyways.

  If everything goes as planned BURP will be able to replace the Hubble space telescope and the James Webb telescope which was previously scheduled for launch in 2014. Unfortunately due incompatibility with the VxWorks operating systems on major NASA satellites and rovers we will no longer support the Windows and Linux platforms in the clients. Artists will also have to limit their uploads to sessions depicting planetary objects.

• 20 Mar 2010 13:25:09 UTC
  BETA invites are being sent out
  We are currently sending out BETA invites to all alpha users. In case you don't have a valid email address or your mail provider blocked the email you can read it here:

  Hey Thanks for your donation of computing power to the BURP project! The next phase of BURP is about to begin. If you want to continue taking part in the project please go to the front page and click on the "Upgrade to BETA" button to read more about it. Best regards, Janus Kristensen BURP administrator

• 10 Mar 2010 19:52:58 UTC
  News commenting available
  It is now possible to comment on news, like on any other forum post.

• January downtime. This Friday (the 29th) the site will be offline while migrating to new server software.
  Also, account creation has been closed again due to spammers.

• License changes. We are changing the licensing of the rendered material to a more open set of licenses. Please review the changes to evaluate whether you will continue to contribute processing time to the project.

• Chat with the devs. At 11.15 UTC there's going to be a 1 hour IRC session with questions/answers about BURP in the #blender.fi channel.

• CATS update. A new and upgraded version of CATS is available - please give it a test to see if you can find any errors with it

• We are temporarily accepting new accounts

• Migration is starting. During the next few months we are going to migrate to the BURPv.3 website. You can follow the progress and hickups in the forums and on the server status page.

• New faces. A few days ago the number of active developers increased dramatically - a big welcome to Brian and Matthew!

• May downtime. This monday will bring extended downtime while the renderqueue is cleaned and a thorough system backup is taken. New sessions will not be accepted before the end of the maintenance (although you can naturally still enqueue them).

• Corrections to yesterday's news. A tiny spelling error in yesterday's news item made it look like GM had acquired BURP. The correct wording (without the spelling error) was naturally:
  "Happy 1st of April!"

• Sold to GM. We are happy to announce that BURP along with all user accounts has been sold to General Motors. The GM spokesman explains the purchase as follows:
  "Our cars have sophisticated computer systems protecting you during accidents, we want those systems to also do something useful when you are not performing an emergency braking procedure. Drive safely and make the world a better place by letting your car render 3D graphics."
  As a consequence we will no longer be supporting the Windows and Linux operating systems and will instead focus all development on the custom processors in the Cadilac and Chevrolet series.
  Please note that the current version of the GM-compatible client may need as much as 30 secs to pause and resume computations. This is not an issue as long as you avoid situations that require use of the brakes or the stearing wheel during those 30 seconds. The radio will remain unaffected.

• Unexpected downtime. (07.19 UTC) Power is back and the server is now online again. The issue was a broken cable at a nearby high-voltage power transformation station.

• Unexpected downtime. (23.54 UTC) We are currently experiencing an extended power outtage and will be shutting down the servers to protect them from harm.

• Up again. We are back up and running. Workunits will start being sent out over the next few days - slowly at first, though

• Raid drive issues. The (other, not the one that has already failed) raid drive just failed and went offline. The project will be down until the issue can be narrowed down and solved.

• External router is replaced. The switchover only took 15 mins and everything should be back up and running now - and running 4 times as fast too

• External router is going to be replaced. Tuesday the 14th from 10:00 UTC the website will be offline while the router that handles external networking is replaced in order to upgrade to a faster connection from a new ISP. Initial estimates say that the connection should be stable again at 17:00 UTC but the actual time depends on how fast DNS servers around the world will pick up our new IP address.
  Short version: Website will be down Tuesday, hopefully up again for more BURPing by Wednesday.

• Unexpected downtime. The webserver was unexpectedly offline today from about 10:00 UTC to 21:00 due to a human error introduced in the firewall rules while updating the server software. Over the next few weeks you may see similar sporadic downtime or interrupted connections as the development platform for the beta system is being installed and tested.

• Spam. If you have received spam appearing to originate from our servers or linking to our servers please have a look at this forum thread about the recent spambot activity.

• Service notice. For the next 5 weeks it may take a little longer than usual to get your sessions accepted due to the holidays. You can expect sessions to be accepted at least once per week rather than the usual once per 48 hours.

• Update to the client. Version 4.57 of the client is ready to be deployed as soon as the renderqueue has been cleared. This version includes the latest version of Blender 2.46 and the Glue2 code that makes it work with BURP. No new sessions will be accepted until the renderqueue is empty but you are free to submit sessions to be rendered afterwards.

• Extended downtime. The monday maintenance this next monday will be extended with additional downtime in the afternoon starting at 14.00 UTC lasting for about 6 hours. During the downtime the database and filesystems will be cleaned.
  In the hours leading up to the maintenance no new sessions will enter the renderqueue - it is of course still possible to submit sessions for later rendering.

• More work?. BURP will not always have work available. If you are interested in keeping your machine(s) crunching even when BURP is out of work you are encouraged to check out some of the other BOINC projects. By setting a high resource share for BURP and a lower resource share for the other projects you are sure to get BURP workunits when there are any.

• End of alpha. The alpha project code has been feature-frozen and all development will now be focused on writing the beta code.
  The alpha website will remain fully functional until the beta version can be deployed. For more information please check this forum thread.

• Corrections to yesterday's news. A couple of people have pointed out several spelling errors in yesterday's newspost. The intended message was of course:
  "Happy 1st of April"

• Sold to Apple. BURP has been sold to Apple Inc. and will be renamed to i3D. This will have a few implications, mostly:
  

  • It will now cost $89 to participate in the project (as artist or CPU-time contributor)
  • The BURP client will require a working installation of iTunes and Quicktime v. 7.4 in order to correctly download workunits
  • The screensaver has been implemented to show a trade display of Apple products

  Additionally all the movie files on the website will now include DRM so that they can only be played with the Quicktime player and cannot be copied.

• Extended downtime. The monday maintenance tomorrow will be extended with additional downtime starting 12:30 UTC ending approximately 23:00 UTC. The downtime will be utilized for backups, further debugging of the raid mirror issue and for general system maintenance.

• Downtime. The website will be down for 2 hours starting 16:00 UTC due to a scheduled power cut.

• Unexpected downtime. The project is back online after almost a week of downtime caused by an unfortunate combination of events. More information in this forum thread.

• Hardware updates. A bit of panic started to grow today when a BIOS update (due to the reoccouring disk issue) froze the webserver completely - nothing could get it back up, not even a power cycle. Fortunately it turned out that the old BIOS settings were simply not being read correctly by the new BIOS. After clearing the BIOS RAM the system is now running again.

• Unexpected downtime. The project was temporarily offline for about 4 hours starting at 8 UTC due to an issue with a network cable. Everything is back online now.

• Raid drive failures. The same raid drive failed again. This time the project scheduler was taken offline while the drives resynced to be able to be back up to full speed faster (while the drives are resyncing the database will be slower than usual).
  Tomorrow afternoon (UTC) the system will be taken down for maintenance for a period of around 3-4 hours.

• Unexpected downtime. A failed raid drive caused around 2 mins of downtime today. More info in this technical post

• More work. The first few test-sessions went through without any issues and BURP will now be sending out workunits and accepting sessions again. Enjoy!

• Server upgrade done. The new server is up and running, preparations are made to start rendering again tomorrow.

• Server upgrade starting. All the new parts for the server have arrived. The website will be offline for a few hours while installing the new components (during 11:00 - 13:00 UTC).

• Server upgrade preparations. New server parts are being delivered at some point this week. A great thanks goes to the participants who took part in the fundraising!

• Unexected downtime. (11.00 UTC) The server crashed again, this time for good. The motherboard did a suicidal action and took the CPU with it down.
  Until it is possible to install a replacement motherboard and CPU the server will be running in degraded-mode meaning that no sessions will be rendered and no access will be available to the result and workunit database (see the more technical details for a reason why). Forums and the remaining website should be unaffected and no data was lost during this incident.
  Updates on service availability will be posted here when the status changes. Currently mail and CVS is offline along with the longterm storage array. A fundraising for the new server components has been created. The exact cost is still to be determined. Keep tuned for updates.

• Unexected downtime. Another server crash, this is seemingly a rather serious hardware issue related to the motherboard.

• Unexected downtime. The webserver crashed this friday and was restarted a few hours ago. An investigation into what has happened has been initiated.

• CATS update. A new version (0.2.1) of CATS was released today.

• Software upgrade. The upgrade to our new client is complete, enjoy!

• Extended downtime. The monday maintenance tomorrow will be extended to cover the entire day as a new version of our client is rolled out. The new client will include version 2.45 of Blender and will be released simultaneously for the Windows and Linux platforms.

• Service notice. If you have workunits from session 648 please abort them as the session has been cancelled since it was hitting some of the built-in time limits of the client.

• Service notice. Session 639 had to be cancelled due to a glitch in the workunit generator. It has been resubmitted as session 645. Workunits that have already been started will be completed and will get granted credit.

• Unexpected downtime. The database server has been taken down for about an hour to complete a file relocation that was affecting its performance.

• Service notice. In an attempt to slightly increase the performance of the renderfarm in situations where there hasn't been work for a while the server will now only send out 1 workunit per machine at most every 5 mins. This should limit the number of workunits that people can "stack up" and hence give more machines the possibility of joining in on the rendering.
  For more information, visit this thread

• A movie tutorial. Recently a video tutorial was posted describing the entire process of uploading and downloading scene files and data to and from the servers - as well as how to use some advanced postprocessing effects available in Blender.
  The video may be of general interest - even to people who would just like to have a look at some of the tools used by 3D animators.

• Downtime. Since no sessions are being rendered at the moment the result table has been taken offline for some cleanup. Due to this any functions that require access to the result table (like browsing results) will be very slow. The cleaning is expected to last for the remainder of the day

• Service notice. The database will be on and off for the remainder of the day. This unscheduled maintenance happens in order to attempt to increase the performance of the system in cases of sessions with short runtime.
  You should be able to get workunits most of the time.

• Bye Gandalf, many bytes old. 'Gandalf the Grey' - one of our master mirrors - sent its final byte to the internet a few days ago and will no longer be able to participate in the mirror network. Fortunately many other mirrors have joined the network since it was originally designed and it is now powerful enough to be run with a single master server.

• Service notice. After about one week where no new sessions were accepted things are now moving forward again. 3 sessions will be started during the next few hours (15.00 UTC to 18.00) and yet another batch will be started later this evening.

• New session checks. Work has started on making a system that will be able to automatically reject sessions that are not suitable for distributed rendering because of low rendertime.

• Service notice. During the next few weeks the acceptance of new sessions will not follow the usual 48-hour limit, sessions may be delayed a bit more than that.

• Extended downtime. The monday maintenance today will be extended: The database server will be offline today from 13.00 to about 18.00 (UTC) in preparations for installing additional disk drives. During this time the server will be doing a backup as well.
  From about 17.00 to about 18.00 (UTC) the webserver will be offline to install new software related to the additional disk drives.
  Update 17:00: Database backup completed, webserver going offline in a moment.
  Update 19:30: The webserver will be on and off for the next few hours due to complications with the disk controller driver software compilation.
  Update 21:00: It seems the driver software is now working as expected, the project will continue running as normally.

• CATS update. A new version of CATS has been released fixing a list of known problems.

• Session renderer checking. Sessions with wrong renderer setting (in Blender) are now automatically rejected by the server. Furthermore much of the information in the uploaded file is used to automatically fill in some of the fields throughout the upload-guide.

• Session thread checking. Sessions with wrong settings for the thread count are now automatically corrected by the server.

• Service notice. The server is currently quite overloaded. Some features may be slow or inaccessible.

• Known bug. There's currently an issue with the linux client causing it to either not be suspendable and/or causing the BOINC client to hang after completing a workunit.

• Client update. Version 4.55 of the client has been released for all supported platforms. This version includes Blender version 2.44 and several bugfixes for bugs discovered in sessions 445-450.
  Please see this forum thread for more information - and for feedback if you experience any issues with the new client.

• BOINC upgrade. The serverside software has been upgraded to the newest BOINC version. This should enable 64-bit hosts to automatically use the 32-bit version of the client to do calculations.

• Service notice. Session 463 was cancelled because it created too many errors.

• Server checking automation. Some of the serverside scripts have been updated to automatically correct sessions with wrong output format. The first session to test this is 445 which had an incorrect output format set.
  Please see this thread for a list of the reasons why some sessions get rejected.

• Mail handling with SPF. The SPF record in the DNS system was broken and caused SMTP relays to be rejected by some MTAs, it has been corrected to use the (hopefully correct) A records instead of MX - However, due to a TTL of 43200 the fix is slightly delayed.
  Translation: Some people have been unable to receive mail from the project for the past couple of days, this should start working again later today...

• More space. In the light of the recent storage issues a new highspeed storage drive has been added to the donation whishlist. It is the hope that this unit can be purchased within this month so that no restrictions need to apply on the number of animations that can be rendered each week.

• Unexpected downtime. During the night the hot storage (where some of the database along with very recent sessions are being stored) got filled to the maximal capacity again. Last time we had issues on that drive was on Apr 13 where the upload partition was moved away from it to make more room. To sort out the issue in the short term sessions now stay in hot storage for a shorter amount of time, for a long term solution we may have to look into buying more highspeed harddrive space.

• Faster validation. New code in the validator has greatly increased the speed with which results that are completely identical can be validated.
  Also a new system has been put in place to detect and avoid database overloads generated by users continously scraping the website for data using automated bots. This new system will also attempt to kick in when the database is overloaded for other reasons and may inform users to wait a few seconds before retrying the request.
  This should already produce a noticeable speed increase on pages related to results and workunits.

• Mirror system fix. An error was found in 2.02 and the mirror code has been hotfixed to 2.03.

• Mirror software upgrade. The mirror code has been updated to version 2.02 - mirror owners please have a look in the forum for more information.

• Unexpected downtime. The validation of workunits was stalled shortly today to enable the database server to refresh some tables related to the soon-to-come Bittorrent support. The plan is to expand the data handling system of both BOINC and BURP to include P2P file transfers as an option for those who want to share their network resources to help the project.
  Some technical details can be found here.
  The project will be down for about 30 mins tomorrow due to a scheduled power outtage.

• Server is back online. The network connection to the main server has now been restored.
  On an unrelated sidenote our ISP has upgraded the incomming connection to the main server with 50% with no additional expenses. This will directly affect the number of simultaneous sessions that BURP is capable of rendering.

• Unexpected downtime. Due to a human error our main server is without a network connection. Countermeassures have been put in place to avoid this happening again.

• New clients. An official Linux client has been released - please post your experiences in this thread.

• A new rendering priority. A new technique named "Background priority" is being tested on the scheduler at the moment. 368 and 380 have both been selected as test-bunnies for this feature. Background priority scheduling is for optimizing total throughput on lengthy sessions as much as 25% to 50%.
  More details can be found the forum thread.

• CATS update. An alpha version of the CATS utility (to download "raw" session output frames) has been released. Please try it out if you are interested and report any bugs/suggestions/ideas you get while using it.

• Service notice. The credentials needed for a workunit to finish have been changed slightly:
  A workunit now needs 3 results instead of 2 to be equal in order to validate. Furthermore the initial number of results per workunit has been decreased from 5 to 4 to increase performance.
  This change takes effect on new sessions only, old ones will still have the 5/2 setting.

• Unexpected downtime. We have run short on diskspace on the upload partition. The system is currently moving files to the LongtermB drive to utilize the unused diskspace on that drive for the upload directory.

• New client software Blender 2.43. With the release of the new version 4.50 of our client-side code BURP now supports Blender version 2.43. As promised a linux test release will follow shortly after it has been established whether the Windows version works as intended.

• Mirror system updates. The mirror controller has been optimized a lot so that it no longer puts as much load on the memory and filesystem on the main server (previously known to cause issues). It is currently busy preparing the mirrors with the new client version for Windows.

• Compile farm expands. A linux machine has been added to the compile farm and a linux test client is scheduled to be released alongside the new Windows client.

• Service notice. Session 365 and 366 have been aborted due to similar issues as with 349 (Blender crashes). Session 368 is very close to the limits of the old client and will fail on some systems. It has been temporarily suspended and will be used to test the new client.
  The new client is scheduled to be released right after the easter holidays.

• Correction of yesterday's post. A couple of people have pointed out several spelling errors in yesterday's newspost. The intended message was of course:
  "Happy 1st of April"
  Furthermore today's maintenance has been extended to 18:00 UTC to allow the backup system to run to completion.

• Sold to Microsoft. BURP has been sold to Microsoft Corporation and will be renamed to "Microsoft 3D Online". For the future this has a few minor consequences, mainly pricing:
  Render of 1 session: $2
  Render of 10 sessions: $19
  Or a monthly fee of $50 for any number of sessions
  Also our client now requires a genuine installation of MSN Messenger and Outlook Express to work.

• Service notice. Session 349 hit some of the hardcoded time-constraints in our current client and has been aborted. The next generation of clients will allow sessions like this to be rendered.

• Valdator update. The new validator passed its test and will continue to be used to validate future session results as well.

• Service notice. Resumed normal operation mode, sessions will now again be accepted for rendering.
  A glitch in the mailserver caused it to drop all outgoing mail since the power failure. This is fixed now.

• Unexpected downtime. This morning the primary power supply to the main server failed (12V pin voltage out of acceptable range). We are currently running on a backup PSU until a replacement unit can be found. This has caused the usual monday maintenance to be extended for the rest of the day (22:00 UTC).
  To start out with the database will be offline while checking for possible damage. When the database check is finished things will continue in degraded mode (no new sessions are accepted) until a new and stable power supply has been installed.
  The old supply has done well, it has been keeping the system up and running for more than 5 years now.

• Validator updates. The validator has been deployed and will be fine-tuned during the next few sessions. Initially it has been set to 'very strict' allowing only images that match very closely. This setting seems to work fine with Blender since output from two different Blender runs of the same frame match pretty well.

• Mirror update. A new version of the mirror code has been released and will be phased in during this weekend. If you experience any issues with the mirror network please report it so that any bugs can be ironed out as fast as possible. An email has been sent to all mirror owners describing the update procedure..

• Validator ideas turn real. Preliminary work on enabling our first proper validator has begun. The validator makes sure that only correctly rendered images are accepted as valid results. It works by comparing the images to each other and calculating a set of 'delta values' describing the amount of difference between them. If this delta value set is too high the images will be deemed 'not similar' and cannot form a valid result together.

• Mirror update. Unfortunately an error in the mirror software (regarding filetransfers to the mirrors) will delay the deployment of the new mirror code for a few days until a solution has been found.

• Assimilator performance improves. The results of the test where multiple assimilators were used show that running one assimilator per core produces far more assimilated workunits than running just one assimilator. For the future 2 assimilators will be used, one that takes care of even numbered workunits and one that takes care of odd numbered units.

• Service notice. Starting from monday the 19th each monday will have have 5 hours of scheduled project maintenance (and thereby potential downtime) starting at 06:00 UTC. This is done to regularly be able to deploy new code and clean and check databases, hardware, filesystems etc - and to ensure a stable service throughout the rest of the week.
  Usually the downtime will only affect the scheduler (it reports "Project is down") and will leave the website running so that you can still submit sessions or view the gallery, forums etc.
  A notice will be put up each sunday and during the downtime.

• No more compiles from SourceForge. Unfortunately SourceForge have decided to discontinue their compile farm service. BURP has been making quite a lot of use of it to compile for - and maintain compatibility with - other operating systems than Windows. This comes at a particularly bad time because Alpha has 'Initial MacOS X support' as one of its milestones along with a stable linux codebase. The use of emulators to replace the compile farm is being looked into.

• Assimilator update. We are currently testing if it is possible to increase throughput of the assimilator by running several instances of it at the same time, one for each core on the server. So far the results have been very positive.

• Mirror updates. Testing of a new release of the mirror code has begun. It is scheduled to be released next saturday and is backwards compatible with the current controller - meaning that mirror owners can install the update when they've got the spare time for it (once it is released, that is).
  Some of the key features of this version are improved error ressilience, support for file renaming and improved range request support.

• Service notice. A new priority system has been introduced. Furthermore the submitting code has been fixed so that it no longer ignores the session start frames (it would always make sessions start from frame 0 instead of what was used in the session setup). This affected mainly session 321.

• Service notice. Due to the database issues some of the parts for session 313 and 312 were damaged and will appear as dark areas in the video.

• New server status features. The status monitoring system backend has gotten an overhaul in order to improve performance of the website. It is now fast enough to enable progress bars on the serverstatus-page.
  The progress shown for sessions 312 and 313 may be inaccurate while the new system stabilizes.

• Server is back online. [21:15 UTC] Everything is up and running again. Also, the frontpage speed-o-meter now has been updated to use a smarter way to generate the same (and more) statistics.

• Database downtime. [19:03 UTC] The database server is having issues that may be related to a recent switch of harddrives when BURP went into alpha.

• Database downtime scheduled. This weekend (starting saturday the 10th, 08:00 UTC) there will be 24 hours of downtime to correct an issue where big sessions requiring large amounts of memory can block smaller sessions from getting started. To flush the render queue no more sessions will be accepted for rendering until after the downtime.
  For more information about the issue see this post.
  Until then we will use a backup queueing strategy which is almost as good and could be applied right away with no downtime.

• Lost results. Scheduler support for resending of lost results (several people reported that somehow their clients lost track of some results) has been enabled.

• Nightly cvs checkouts. BURP will (starting from right now) release nightly cvs checkouts of the opensource code used in the project. This comes in the form of neatly packaged .tar.gz-archives and anonymous CVS access - have a look at the Opensource Development-page.

• More work for everyone. [21:11 UTC] Throughout the day the main server has been very busy handing out workunits to everyone. An issue with the serverside software has caused a slight pause during session 254, but we are picking up again at full speed now.

• Alpha. Alpha has started.

• Things are looking good. The first session used to test that everything is up and running went through the system without too many issues having to be fixed.

• Bad weather. The weather outside is pretty extreme and the backup power generator has been switching on and off from time to time this morning signalling that the power here is not entirely stable. In case of an extended power outage the alpha switchover will have to be delayed untill next weekend.

• Scheduled downtime. 48 hours of downtime is scheduled to start this thursday, BURP is expected to be up again late friday the 23rd or early saturday (UTC)
  The time will be spent doing yearly maintainance, upgrading hardware (network card) and software (operative system and BOINC upgrade) as well as making the switchover to alpha status.

• Service notice. The upload system has now completed testing and is ready for the soon-to-come alpha switchover.
  Do you like programming in Java? Would you like to help us out? Have a look at our first community programming task: an applet for uploading sessions.

• No PoV-ray support. Due to time constraints the PoV-ray renderer has currently been removed from the list of renderers. It is expected to return at some later stage.

• Downtime. 17:15 UTC: The result database is semi-offline for the next hour or so to increase the maximal allowed storage size to 256TB. During this time it will be hard to get or return work.
  18:00 UTC: The database has now beed upgraded. However, some parts of session 233 were damaged - it will be requeued for re-render later.

• More work available. A bunch of workunits have been released and if successful more will be released during the day.
  Also, it is now possible to edit your gallery description and session information. Both places support BBcode (although you cannot have BBcode in the title or the short description of a session - since these are used to provide fast overviews).

• Client fixes available shortly. The directory issue found last month has been corrected and a new version of the client will be available shortly - and some workunits to test it on.

• Admin interface updates and empty directories. The upload response system is nearly complete and has been put into action. You should now get immediate feedback from cancelled sessions - along with a reason why they were cancelled.
  This is a step towards an alpha BURP-system where uploaded sessions are reviewed and queued on a daily basis.
  Mild security notice:
  In the most recent session (233) 2 workunits were sent out containing code that could potentially create empty directories on your harddrive outside the BOINC directory. If you participated in this session please go here for more information on how to recover from this situation.

• Stitcher improves. Several major bugfixes have been made to the tools that handle images in the system.
  The stitcher (that reassembles images that were rendered seperately on multiple machines) was completely rewritten to support the very complex use of layers that Blender outputs, previously this malfunctioning component caused background layers to disappear on some sessions (ie. session 201).
  Furthermore the image preview handler on the website was upgraded to handle images of HD quality and beyond. Previously, when displaying really big images, the image would collapse into a streak. Also the preview system has been corrected to no longer send out images at 100% quality levels but make use of JPEG compression to speed up the browsing experience even for full-resolution images.

• Service notice. The tasks on the progress tracker are now the only tasks left before its possible to do another grand-scale test of the system and possibly moving on to the Alpha phase.
  Recently a big donation was made that made it possible to buy domain names for the project. These will be bought when we reach Beta.

• Downtime. The server setup was down for half an hour today while upgrading the network to support QoS (quality of service). This new feature should allow the website and on-site equipment to keep functioning correctly even when the data server is using all available outbound bandwidth.
  The development of the upload response system is progressing pretty well too.

• You will get here if you BURP. On a funny sidenote we recently hit Google and Microsoft top 1 on the keyword "BURP", so people with firefox or IE can now simply write "burp" in their address bar to get to our site.

• Upload feedback soon to be available. The render queue has been cleaned and the remaining sessions are currently being prepared for rendering. A lot of sessions were discarded because they did not fulfill the requirements or because the settings were not right. As a consequence it is now the plan to add a system that will provide uploaders with feedback on sessions that fail already during the initialization phase. That way people can learn of their mistakes and give it another try.

• More testing needed. We are currently doing more tests with the new clients as mentioned in the news from Sep 09

• Testing. Later today we will be testing a series of new client versions. If all goes well 2-3 sessions will be dequeued and rendered to test the stability of the new code.

• Summer update 2. The longterm storage manager has now been completed and been put into action.
  During some of the early tests with the storage manager session 139 got damaged beyond repair. There was no backup and there are no plans to back up session data in the future either (perhaps input files and postprocessed files, but backing up all the intermediate files would require too much space).
  You can keep track of diskspace usage along with other information on the server status page
  The next two steps of the 'coding vacation' involves public testing of the new wrapper (and later of the new Blender code), so stay tuned!

• More bandwidth available. As part of a general network upgrade our ISP plans to double our ingoing bandwidth for free (again!) starting August the 28th. This will most likely make it possible to reach speeds of multiple frames per minute and should speed up rendering of simple animations considerably.

• Summer update 1. The main servers have now been relocated and although the move did bring some unexpected downtime everything now seems to be working as it should. Within the next week or so the network connection speed will get a slight boost as our ISP doubles our incomming bandwidth. The hope is that this will produce less congestion when several sessions are being rendered concurrently. Untill this upgrade is complete the main webserver will be running on very limited bandwidth and may appear slow or stop responding.
  Furthermore the forum code has been merged with the mainstream BOINC CVS now, so other projects may start using it.

• Summer holidays. Starting from the 1st of July and untill the middle of September BURP will be having a summer vacation. During this time no sessions will be rendered (you can still get in the queue though) and you shouldn't expect answers from any of the devs.
  Of course we (the devs) won't just be sitting around iddle, the following things are on the schedule:

  • Create the longterm storage manager program and activate it
  • Rewrite the Blender wrapper to include new ideas from the BOINC example wrapper
  • Update our patches for Blender to work with v. 2.42
  • Completely relocate the main server infrastructure and components to a new hosting facility
  • Merge our improved forum code with the mainstream BOINC CVS so that other projects may enjoy the benefits of it.
  • Relax and enjoy the sun =)

  Some of the above points may cause the website to be unavailable for extended periods of time while your ISP's DNS servers update their entry for the website.
  A nice summer to you all!

• Service notice. Session 192 has been cancelled because it was hitting some of the hardcoded computational limits set for the test client. Credit will be given for the workunits where 2 or more succesful results have been returned. Unfortunately it was not practical to generate credit for workunits with only 1 result - however, you can rest assured that your results have been very valuable to the project. The next sessions should start shortly. These both have a much lower expected resource usage. If you still have any session 192 workunits on your client you are free to let them run to completion or manually abort them. If you let them run the results will be used to generate an analysis of the system performance but not to make a video.

• Renders must be suitable. If you think about uploading an animation please understand that we do not accept animations with a rendertime of less than 30 secs per frame (on our reference machine) due to reasons discussed in this forum thread

• Upload interface available. The experimental upload interface is now available for public testing - please provide us with feedback in this forum thread.
  Also please note that only the Blender Internal renderer is supported at this time - and that we will only pick out some of the sessions that are uploaded and render those.
  Hopefully the server will be able to handle the load - but please be patient if it is slowed down a bit.

• Upload interface tests. Soon it will be possible to help test the upload system. Every other week a few of the most interesting uploaded animations will be picked out and rendered to test the system.
  Please be aware that only the internal render engine in Blender is supported at this point.

  To test the system there's current an ultra quick session running.

• Upload interface. As you may have noticed on the Server status page the upload interface is currently undergoing final tests. Shortly it will be made publicly available for testing purposes.

• Mirror software updates. A new version (2.00rc1) of the mirror software has been released. This version fixes a list of issues and breaks backwards compatibility - the 1.x series will no longer be able to participate in the mirror array.
  More information in this forum thread

• Web updates. The web interface software has been updated - feel free to hunt down some bugs

• Failing gateway. A second replacement internet gateway unit has been installed as the replacement didn't seem to do the trick (it crashed several times during the first week).

• Failing gateway being fixed. The malfunctioning internet gateway unit will be replaced later today. This will cause about 10 mins of downtime. This should fix the recent connectivity issues and also increase the internal network capacity by a factor of 5-10.

• Mail is back. Now the mailserver is up and running again. Only the BOINC scheduler and a few auxilary services need to be fixed now before work can be resumed. We are now also about halfway through the usability analysis of the Ul/Dl interface.

• Back to pre-alpha. The project stage has been switched back to pre-alpha untill the current issues have been fixed.

• The mirrors are back. The connection to the primary mirror has been fixed and the main server is now running on updated software. There will still be a few errors and issues as the new software is configured for optimal performance.

• Mirrors will be back. A technician will hopefully be looking at restoring the primary mirror network connection Monday. This unexpected extra downtime will be used to also do some network hardware upgrades at the main webserver site.

• Unexpected downtime. There's currently three issues preventing new work to be created. 1) The server software upgrade is taking much much longer than expected. 2) Our primary mirror has been offline for a day now. 3) The network connection to the main server has been less than stable recently.
  I will keep you updated when things start to look a bit brighter. Sorry for the delay.
  In the meantime I'd like to welcome another 150 users who have recently signed up.

• Scheduled backups cause downtime. Another backup will be done monday the 27th of March together with a very large system software upgrade. During this upgrade the website may become slow or stop responding. If everything goes well another set of tests will be started Tuesday.
  Also welcome to the 275 new users who have joined since the EoPA test started!

• Service notice. Once the current set of workunits have completed the project will be down to backup the main database and server content.

• Account creation is enabled. It is now again possible to create accounts.
  The plan is to run several tests over the next few days. These tests mark the end of Pre-alpha and the beginning of the Alpha stage of this project.

• Alpha soon. The newest client version seems to behave much better than the previous ones. Preparations are being made for the switchover to the Public Alpha stage of this project.
  Stay tuned, account created will be reenabled shortly!

• Take part in the survey. Please take a moment to look at this small survey for the upcomming upload/download interface. The answers will be used in the design of the interface. It is mostly targetted at users who would like to upload animations at some point.

• Bugs are everywhere. Currently work is being done on correcting a bug that seems to happen on all systems except the in-house test systems. So far it is unclear what the difference is and why the in-house systems are not affected.

• Enough testing. Enough information has been gathered from the test to do at least a couple more weeks of client development before the next test. Occasionally a few WUs will be sent out to test particular features.

• Service notice. A test of the latest set of client changes is currently ongoing. Accidentally a batch of faulty workunits were sent out during the night (UTC). These will stall at 98.5%. If you get such a WU please abort it. Workunits that stall at 0.01% should not be aborted unless they stall for more than 30 mins.

• BURP wishes a merry Christmas to all.
  The disk-test went well and the two drives have been put into action.

• New disks have arrived. The disk upgrade for the longterm storage arrived today. Earlier today there was 5 min of downtime while the two disks were being installed. They are currently being checked for errors and prepared for use. This is expected to take about 24 hours.

• Backups. Starting at 19.00 UTC the server will be down for backup and a forum software update. It is expected to be up again at most an hour later.
  [Edit at 19.56 UTC] The project is online again. The forum software is about to be updated.
  [Edit at 22.52 UTC] Forum software is still being updated. Please be patient. BURP is the first BOINC project to test this code so problems are expected.
  [Edit at 00.58 UTC] Ok, getting late here - will have to fix the remaining issues tomorrow. Please try to find any issue with the current forum software (ignore all errors that are not related to the forum for now!). You can test the forum using the test forum and report any issues in this thread.

• More storage is on the way. Today the longterm storage harddrive kit has been ordered. The kit will add 0.6TB storage so that the results of our computations can be stored for future viewing.
  Thanks to all of the users who helped contribute to this purchase!
  You can find more information about this in the donation history and in this forum thread.

• Mirror updates. The mirror software has been updated to version 1.93. In the previous versions many of the registered mirrors could not become activated due to several bugs. Most of these bugs should have been fixed in this new version. Feel free to comment or come with ideas in this forum thread.

• More memory for the database. Yesterday the long awaited memory upgrade for the database server finally arrived. A great, great thanks goes to all of the users who helped contribute to this purchase. It's very encouraging to have this kind of support for the project!
  You can find more information about this memory upgrade in the donation history and in this forum thread.

• Elysiun forum. A thread about the recent test has been posted on Elysiun - a Blender community forum. Forums will be the usual way for artists to announce work they have done using BURP, so the mirror network has to be able to handle the spike of load that follows such a post. For this test they did absolutely great and delivered more than 17GB of content over a short period of time.

• Mirrors are back online. The mirror network has now been mostly reestablished. There's still a lot of work to do on the mirror software before it is ready for the next release.

• Mirror network crashed. We experienced a mirror controller crash that corrupted the database table that keeps track of what files are located on what mirrors. The mirror dispatcher (that sends out the files) accidentally assigned each file to the same mirrors 22 times...
  The mirror dispatcher has been recoded and it is now in the process of retransmitting the files to the mirrors. This may take at least a day since we are talking about all files ever produced by BURP.

• Milestones for pre-alpha. The End of Pre-Alpha milestones have been posted. If you have any comments or suggestions feel free to post a reply in the forum thread.
  Also session 139 is almost finished.

• See pending credit. As a special Halloween feature you will now be able to see your pending credit (if you have any) on the pending credit page reachable from your account page. This feature may or may not persist depending on the extra load it puts on the servers.

• More work and clients. A lengthy session is about to be submitted together with the new Linux client within not so long. Stay tuned.
  The new linux client is only 1/4 of the size of the previous client due to the use of UPX to compress the executable. It is the first time since the client rewrite that linux is supported, making this release very experimental.
  And the test is running. The linux client should support most linux systems, however there's still a lot of library issues that need to be sorted out. Please report any linux-related issues during this test in this thread
  This test also covers more mirror testing, so Windows clients are of course welcome as well.

• Service notice. The tiny test (session 138) completed successfully.

• Compilefarms, yay. SourceForge.net has been kind enough to make a compile farm available for opensource projects like BURP. In a short while a lot of testing will be done using their systems and hopefully an x86 compatible linux client will be the result. If their service turns out to be stable and easy to use it will be used for future versions as well (and possible also for porting to Mac OSX).
  To thank SourceForge for their hard work their logo is now displayed on the bottom of our front page.
  The tiny test has been rescheduled for later today.

• Server is back. The server upgrade is complete. A full system backup has just started. When it finishes, a tiny animation will be run through to test that everything is still working as expected.

• BOINC upgrade. A server upgrade to major version 5 of the BOINC serverside software is planned for this weekend. The new software will allow users to use the new line of clients that will eventually replace the current 4.x clients.
  This upgrade may cause temporary issues throughout the upgrade timeframe.

• Session 137. Session 137 has completed in just 16 hours (Totalling 16 days of CPU time) which is a speedup of almost 2400% compared to rendering this on a single system. Also, a few issues relating to mirror redirections was identified as well as some errors regarding offset downloading on some of the mirrors. The last class of errors will need more debugging in order to be fixed. Basicly a very successful test!
  5.3GB of data was served using the mirror network during the last 16 hours.

• Testing the mirrors. A short render (session 137) has just started. The purpose is to test recent changes in the mirror software and compare this to previous results. Part of this test is a loadtest, where the system will be asked to run at full speed for a short amount of time. This may or may not slow down the website depending on how well the test goes.

• 3000 user limit hit. Today we hit the limit for the number of users in this stage of the project - 3000 registered users!
  Originally the expected user count was around 200-300 people at most. However, there has clearly been a lot more interest in this project than anticipated. In order to still be able to effeciently manage testing and bugreports, account creation will be disabled untill we reach the Alpha stage.

• Mirror updates. The mirror software has been updated to version 1.92. This should fix several issues regarding PHP compatibility.

• Unexpected downtime. Recently there has been some network dropouts (at one point for an entire day) on the connection that the webserver resides on. The problem has been isolated to a single network card. Scripts for automatic detection and recovery in situations like this are being made in order to try to avoid downtime.

• Become a mirror. It is now possible to register your server to become a BURP mirror. When dealing with 3D graphics and animations there will always be massive amounts of data that needs to be transfered somewhere else: input files, movie files, application files etc. - this is what the BURP mirrors do, they serve the files for the rest of the users here.
  If you are interested in helping out by setting up a BURP mirror please have a look at the page about Becomming a BURP mirror.
  If you have any comments about the setup procedure or encounter any issues please post in the forum thread about the new mirror setup guide.

• More memory for the database. The place where the RAM for the database server was bought wasn't able to deliver today. The upgrade will be delayed a few days.

• Memory. Ok, we are getting closer to the scheduled memory upgrade on the DB server Tuesday. The server will be temporarily offline for an expected 3 hours starting Tuesday at 16:00 UTC while the new memory is installed and tested.
  If you would like to help us buy the new memory modules, please have a look at the donation page.

• Saving up for memory. We are saving up for a planned memory upgrade for the database server next Tuesday - please have a look at this forum thread for more information if you would like to help out.

• Database overload. The main reason for the database overload during the last test has now been isolated. We will work closely together with BOINC developers in order to attempt to correct this issue. This may take a while as it involves making changes to many of the server and client parts.

• Unexpected downtime. We just had a database problem where queries running against the result table would suddenly take way too long and start locking up the entire database. For now the issue has been resolved by converting that database table to InnoDB instead of MyISAM. More debugging will be done about this later. The part display in the lower left corner may or may not be activated later today. Please understand that everything will be a bit more slow than usual the next couple of days

• Splitframe rendering available. Currently a test is running which will test if splitting each frame into 16 parts will work. The test also makes use of a special technique called motionblur which is made by rendering each WU several times - so it will appear as if the progress indicator goes backwards sometimes, this is perfectly normal.

• All the new server software worked perfectly. Once again development focus will now center on the client issues.

• More work. During today a few workunits will be sent out from time to time to test some of the recent changes.

• Scheduler is back online. (9:32 GMT) The scheduler is now back up as well, no work though - some of the major software updates will begin in a few hours from now.

• The webserver is back up and running. Thank you for your patience!

• Service still down. The initial idea about bringing the server back online today isnt going to work (car problems...long story). Instead it will be brought online late Friday the 22th (GMT).
  During the weekend the server will undergo several BOINC related software updates. The forums and website will remain online at that time, but you may experience short outtages or temporary error messages while browsing the site.
  After that some of the new software for handling frames will be installed. The new software is capable of doing "split-frame rendering" - a way of rendering where each frame is split into several parts and then sent to different computers to speed up the render process.

• Downtime. As planned the main server has been taken down for an extended outtage that started today, Saturday the 2nd of July. Server is expected to be back up Wednesday the 20th.
  A new set of tests are scheduled for the end of this month, so expect new workunits to be available then.

• Test is complete. The test is almost over now, just waiting for the last results to come back in. A report on the issues found during this test has been made available in the forums. Feel free to comment on it or come with further ideas and solutions.

• New client tests. Heavy testing of the new client has begun. This session (session 131) is even more demanding the the last one. It will use about 300MB RAM and a fair amount of time to render each frame.
  The new client, which also features the recently released Blender 2.37, should now record used CPU time correctly even when it has been in suspend-to-memory mode. Note: suspending on very complex sessions (like this one) may take a while - usually not more than 1 min though.
  As usual the workunits will be slowly created over the next day or so to avoid complete network congestion.

• New Blender version. Version 2.37 of the official Blender has been released. This version will be used for the tests scheduled to be run in the end of the month.

• BOINC bugs. Recently the project log and certain bug-reports suggest that there may be a problem with some of the client software causing it to look as if BURP is "taking over" other projects. This issue is being looked into.

• The test has ended. Actually it was finished a couple of days ago but was missing a few frames that have somehow gotten lost. The session (session 129) that was rendered made heavy use of reflections and transparency raytracing and is by far the most CPU-intensive session rendered so far.

• The next test is going to start soon. The new suspend/resume functions will be tested during this session. Each frame needs a lot of CPU time so if your BOINC client has multiple projects and a default setup the BURP workunits will at least be suspended once or twice during the run.
  You are encouraged, although not forced, to upgrade your BOINC core client to version 4.41 or above - as this and later versions have several bugfixes aimed specifically at BURP.

• Buggy clients available. 4 workunits were sent out with an updated client that supports suspending (but not resuming due to a bug, hehe, so halfway there) Suspending these WU will make BOINC do nothing untill restarted. If you got one of these (session 129) either hit 'restart project' or don't suspend the WU.
  The upcomming client (a test version of this was quickly tested with these 4 WU) has an improved estimate on the time to finish the workunit, it also includes more debugging and last but not least it should be able to suspend/resume - at least the suspend part has been confirmed now.

• No more dos boxes. The dosbox issue in windows has now been corrected. Work will continue on the important suspend/resume functions needed in the client for it to be able to work in an environment where other BOINC projects are also running.

• BOINC requirements changed. Minimum recommended BOINC client version is now 4.35 - you will still be able to use older versions for some time.
  Today we also got the much needed network upgrade on the main server! - a great thanks goes out to Kasmok who donated the money for 1 year of the 4x faster outgoing internet connection.

• Service instability. There are currently network errors on our line to the ISP. This is caused by hardware errors on their end. They are working hard to fix it as fast as possible. Untill then access to the webserver will be off-and-on. Sorry about that.

• Windows debugging. Before a new test starts some time will be spent on debugging the current windows client errors that have been reported - thank you all for your patience and help!

• Service notice. There will be a short run of superfast workunits to test the new windows client. Due to an error in the mirror software all test-mirrors were disabled during the first stage of this run. Currently the mirrors are being resynced.

• Results are now visible. Popski ("user of the day" today) had as his third whish "I would like to see results of my computer calculations.". This is now possible even before the running session is completely done.
  Whenever a workunit has been completed (enough people have returned results that are equal for that unit) a preview of the resulting frame or subframe will be present. Take a look

• Cable mess. The network wires at the BURP main webserver are being moved around a bit. Please expect a few outages during today and the next few days.

• A network upgrade is planned for the 1th of May. This will double the ingoing bandwidth on the main webserver.

• More test WUs. The next couple of days there will be a slow stream of testing WUs. They will help diagnose the download problems encountered in the last test.

• Report on mirrors is ready. An initial analysis report on the first mirror- and download array test has been made available in this thread - feel free to comment or add suggestions for solutions.

• Traffic jam. Some corrections have been made to the BOINC client. It will be in-house tested during the weekend and if it proves to fix the download problem the previous test will be re-run (note: and the minimum client version will be bumped to a yet unreleased development version...)
  This project website is getting a lot of traffic these days. To avoid slowing down the website too much all downloads have been temporarily disabled.

• Testing aborted. Ok, this seems to be going nowhere. The scheduler has been shut down for now (and the download array will follow shortly) - it seems we hit a couple of problems with the BOINC download system not being completely compatible with the download array software. An in-depth analysis based on your feedback will be made during the next couple of days.
  Thank you all very much for participating in this test - your help and (extreme) patience has been much appreciated!
  
  All workunits that have not yet downloaded the files will automatically be discarded by the client. Just sit back and relax untill the next test =)

• (18:01 UTC) Network swamped. And there we go - network swamped.
  Please update your BOINC client if you haven't yet done so. Minimum version is now 4.19

• Fry the network. In an attempt to fry our network connections (hehe) an animation will be inserted into the render queue later today (about 18:00 UTC). A lot of newcommers will be downloading the client for the first time, so please be patient - the download network has scaled (using test servers) to be able to handle 5 times the troughput that we could hande around christmas but at the same time we have got 10 times as many participants...
  You will be able to follow the progression of the rendering on its gallery page.

• The server is now online again. The tests proved that there is a little more work needed on the download network part but we are getting near some results. The next test will be run publicly within not too long. If that test is successfull the mirror registration forms will be made available.

• Scheduled downtime. As part of the final in-house test stages of the download network software the main server will be taken offline for 8 hours tonight (UTC)

• Welcome new users. During the last couple of weeks there have been a true invasion of users. To make sure you all notice: This is still a pre-alpha-stage project.
  Expect nothing to work - and when something works expect it to stop working or crash your computer... The software is highly experimental.
  Currently there is no test animations running, so most of you will have to wait for a while before even getting your first workunit.
  With the current amount of active users the download array software will have to be completed before any further tests can be run - trying to run a test with more than 400 simultaneous users without the mirroring software would most certainly kill our network link for days.

• The bug has been found. Soon it will be possible to register as a BURP mirror.
  The registration form hasn't yet been enabled but you can read more about becomming a BURP mirror at this location

• Strange mirror issues. The download array software is still being tested and developed.
  Currently one of the test servers is having some strange problems with the mirror software. Hopefully this bug will be found and fixed soon.

• The animation started yesterday is already done (wow!). Also this time only very few errors actually survived to the final result - which is good when considering that the current validator is one that doesn't take most of the errors into account.
  You can download the results by following this link.

• More bandwidth available. This time the servers have 3 times as much bandwidth, however they are still having problems serving all the requests at the moment. Please be patient. The download array that will eventually fix this network congestion is scheduled to be tested by the end of this month.

• The previous render has finished. There is some flickering due to BURP changing from Blender version 2.34 to 2.36 in the start of the render. I did not know that that 2 versions of Blender would have such a large difference in what the render result is.
  You can find the results of the "Sebulba"-render in MPEG4 (DivX) format in this directory
  A great thanks goes to all who helped debug the clients this time - and to BgDM who made the blendfile available on elysiun! Torq uv-mapped it which is also quite an achievement!

• Splitframe rendering. Rendering by parts is now supported and has been tested on the clientside. It will take a while before this is fully supported on the serverside as well.

• The main webserver is currently having a network jam. The webpage and downloads will be slow the next couple of days.
  Sorry about that.

• Compiling. It has shown to be possible to use cygwin (a windows implementation of linux) to compile blender with the BURP patches for windows - and that it is much easier to use than to attempt a build with scons or MSVC. Thanks to the people who helped me out getting this new build environment to work!
  In short: there will now again be support for the windows platform.

• Yafray tests. Good news everyone: While fiddling around with the blender Yafray plugin I suddenly got it to work with BURP.
  While Yafray is known for being lightning fast at some things it can also take a lot of time to render even simple objects when the number of photons is high. This is why I have always been interested in also supporting Yafray in BURP.
  The current test-implementation of the Yafray BURP patch does not show the progress of each frame as it renders, neither does it record CPU time. Another problem is textures... seems to be tricky to get them to work.
  You will have to wait a couple of months before the first online tests of the Yafray plugin are started - the image gallery is still first priority.

• Compiling... I just used 3 days to try to compile the new blender version (2.36) in windows but failed. I give up on this; blender seems to be incredibly poorly maintained with regards to the windows compile files.
  For the future there will be no support for the windows platform - at least not until someone volunteers to do the compiling on that platform.
  Please take a look in this thread to get more information about this.

• Hardware issues. The project webserver and scheduler is currently having hardware network problems. Scheduler will be offline and webserver will be going up and down randomly. Sorry, we just seem to be this lucky...
  The process of making all the webpages multilingual has also been started, this basicly enables translaters to translate our website into other languages. more about this will follow when the functions for doing so are ready.

• Spendable credit discussion. Information (and possibly a discussion) about the Spendable Cobblestone can be found in the forums

• The scheduler software is now up and running again. The bug was caused by a database layout error which has now been corrected.

• There is currently a problem with the scheduler software. It simply stopped responding after the latest update.
  This means that even though we were about to run a test (you can see that several parts are ready for rendering in the status window) you cannot get in contact with the scheduler - and therefore you cannot get any work.
  I hope to find out what causes this problem as soon as possible.

• Current information box. Added a box (on front page) that shows what is currently in development and how far we are with the particular item.

• The software that will control how downloads are handled is almost done.
  Currently a large rewrite of the web-related backend is happening. The new version will be more flexible than the old - and will be easier to maintain in the future. The rewritten code is making use of some of the newest functions in PHP5 to achieve better performance and stability.
  Preparing to implement the Image and Animation Gallery, which is the place where you will be able to find what has been rendered using BURP. Once the image gallery is ready and the download array has been activated there will be a short run of extensive testing before the project goes into its Alpha stage

• Back again and development continues.
  Currently there are no running tests, so when contacting the project scheduler for work you will get a "No work"-reply or something similar.

• Christmas downtime. Starting from late tomorrow (UTC), during christmas and untill the new year the server will be down
  Development will continue. Especially the storage and data distribution grid will get some attention.
  See you in the new year! =)

• The new clients have been released - please test them

• We are back online.
  A new linux client is ready and has been tested. It is currently being ported to the Windows platform.
  The new clients support CPU time calculations and will try to estimate how much time it will take to render the work you are currently working on. It will also report the CPU time usage to the project servers that will reward you with credit (CS - cobblestones).
  Both will be released very soon.

• The server will be shut down starting from today (Dec 10) 12.00 UTC and will be made available again approximately 4 days later (Dec 14) at 12.00 UTC.
  This downtime is caused by a rapid development phase.

• The windows client is currently buggy. The scheduler will be down untill the problem is fixed - hopefully later today (GMT).

• We are online again.
  Currently running is a large (!) test to check how the workunit transport system acts when input and output files are large. Expected memory usage is high as well. Average frame render times are probably about 30-45mins for a modern computer (these are the workunits with the ID 77).

• Downtime. There will be a planned downtime this weekend starting Friday the 26 about 12GMT to Monday the 29.
  A new operating system will be installed and most of the storage drives will be relocated to make them ready for use.

• Website design. As you can see we are currently testing one of the new website designs. Feedback would be nice - go to this thread...

• The forum is now up and running. Currently focus is on development of the website but at a later stage this is where people will exchange information and get help about their BURP-related problems - and generally just "hang out" with other participants.
  You can find the forums by clicking on "Message boards" in the Community part of the main page

• Video available. The resulting videofiles from the test are now available here for download.
  Due to a few serverside problems during the test some frames went missing - this is what causes the occasional skipping...

• The test of the windows and linux clients have finished. I am now convinced that distributed rendering is very effective and not at all that "impossible" to get working.
  Focus will now be on:
  - Setting up a better website
  - Writing scripts for submission of animations
  - Getting the progressbar in the client working
  - Improving serverside checking of results (the validator)
  - Getting more people to help out with all the details
  You probably won't see much news untill just before the alpha phase of this project begins.
  Thanks for helping out with the testing of the pre-alpha clients! - You helped find several bugs and places that needed improvements.

• The bug has been fixed. The client does not show progress nor CPU time used at this early stage of development.

• A bug in the windows client has been found - I will try to fix it within a couple of hours. Please do NOT run the windows client untill the bug is fixed - it will waste your time.

• The public test of the Windows client will start later today - the new linux client will also be tested. Preparations are being made...
  This time the animation is provided by Mifune and shows a metal-like ring. Each frame uses about 2 to 10 minutes of CPU time on a modern system and at most 32MB of RAM.
  More details will be published later (and the finished animation will be available for download)
  If you haven't yet signed up you can register an account under the "Create account" menuitem and participate in the test.

• Client updates. The linux client has been updated to the same level that the windows client has. A small issue with incompatible commandline options between linux and windows versions will have to be worked out before the test of the windows client that is scheduled to take place next week.
  Recently we have had problems with our mailserver not being able to send any emails to new users - sorry about that, it should be fixed now.
  Reminder: Please note that the fact that this project is still in a pre-alpha state means that you will almost certainly loose (or not get) any credit for the workunits you do.

• Windows client available soon. The windows client has finally been built and will be in-house tested the next couple of weeks. Afterwards there will be a public pre-alpha test of it. More specific information about this will be announced here at that time.

• The pre-alpha test has ended.
  Once again thanks for helping out!

• The pre-alpha test has been very successfull. Already there is enough information to do a lot of changes. The test will be stopped later today
  - thank you for participating!

• An error happened that deleted the file being rendered on the server. Those of you who have been experiencing "Could not find file on server" errors will have to delete the file client_state.xml and try again. Sorry about the confusion.

• The test has started. The animation being rendered is a simple test-animation aimed at using about 5mins/frame on a modern desktop computer. It uses about 20MB of ram.
  A lot of stuff isn't implemented yet, so you are probably going to see a few warnings on the way =)
  Also, we are in no way responsible for any damage that this software may do to you, your computer, pet, whatever

• Testing opens soon. A public pre-alpha test is going to be launched later today for the linux i686 compatible systems. The idea is to find out what parts of the server-system needs to be redesigned. Untill the test starts you will get the message "No work from project" when running the client.

• The idea of using Yafray as the primary renderer has been dropped. Instead focus is going to be on Blender

• Assimilator works. The assimilator is working and a basic encoder that saves the rendered animation as XviD is up and running.
  You can find out more about the progress of development by looking at this file - you can also get an idea about what is going to happen in the future

• Textures are working. Finally got textures to work with the render-client. Did the first test-render with textures - and it works!
  The next couple of days focus will be on getting the assimilator (the part of the server that takes care of the results when they are finished rendering) to work correctly.
  An alphatest is on its way... probably in about 2 months - would very much like to get a windows client working before running any alpha tests.

• First test-renders have started.
  As of now we have a simple working splitter (that split the input-files into frames and make the workunits). Files are distributed the way they are ment to and the rendered images are returned as well.
  Textures and splitting into subframes is not yet supported, though.

• Initial project setup is in progress - more to come later

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