BURP: News

Big Buck Bunny on 3DS

Wed, 02 May 2012 16:19:06 GMT

Today we're seeing the first spin-off project based on the open source CC-BY Big Buck Bunny 3D project: Studio Lumikuu in partnership with the Blender Foundation and Nintendo have created a downscaled version of BBB3D that fits on the handheld "Nintendo 3DS" gaming device. If you happen to own a 3DS this is a great chance to get a sneak-preview of what the full 4K 60fps 3D stereo Sunflower version will be like when it is done rendering. Be sure to post back what you think! - if you spot any errors they can certainly still be fixed.

Longer workunits soon

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 12:02:16 GMT

For the past few months we have been rendering mostly medium-length workunits that have a running time of 1-9 hours on modern machines. The remaining sessions for the Sunflower event mostly all contain very long workunits. If you often turn off your computer without using hibernation or standby then now is a good time to temporarily switch to one or more other BOINC projects that either use checkpointing or have shorter workunits. Bring on the monster units!

Correction to yesterday's news post

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 06:35:02 GMT

The news post that was posted yesterday contained a small auto-correct spelling error that would make it appear that BURP had been bought by Amazon.com. This is not the case. The intended message of the post was of course: "Happy 1st of April!"

BURP has been acquired by Amazon Inc.

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 00:03:20 GMT

Today we can finally announce that the negotiations on the sale of BURP have completed. For a while, now, Amazon.com has been showing interest in the project but last week they made a concrete offer that we could not refuse. The project, including all assets, user information and the "BURP" name has been transfered and the project will be run by the Seattle-based company from now on. The actual price will not currently be disclosed for political reasons. Jeff Bezos, chairman and CEO of Amazon writes:

We sell a lot of stuff online. With BURP and pre-rendered virtual show-rooms we can make that stuff sell itself even better - it's a perfect fit and will make a great addition to our cloud!

As a consequence of the acquisition a number of small changes will happen to the site over the next few weeks as we adopt to the policy of Amazon.com:

The new and improved OneClick-Purchase feature will be added to the gallery. This feature allows you to instantly purchase the ability to view and download any session that you have contributed CPU power towards. For a small additional fee you may even view it twice!
The site will be reworked to fit better on the e-Ink screens of the Kindle and Kindle Touch products. This includes converting all videos and graphics to gray-scale.
The leader boards with top teams and computers will be replaced with a single unified page showing "Top Buyers" mixed with "Top New Products" - there will be plenty of images and a rebate code somewhere.
We now include free shipping!

Get your name in the BBB3D movie credits

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 12:27:05 GMT

People who have contributed (or are contributing) to the Sunflower event (the rendering of Big Buck Bunny 3D) can get their names in the movie credits. The only requirement is that at least one of your machines has taken part in the rendering and has contributed something useful and gotten BOINC credit for it. Check this out: http://burp.renderfarming.net/naming_choice.php

IPv6 day

Wed, 08 Jun 2011 20:05:08 GMT

The world is changing - and so is the Internet. Today is IPv6 day: a lot of websites test out IPv6 connectivity on their main domains for 24 hours and BURP is participating in this test. There are 3 outcomes to the test: 1) If you see a red, green and blue "IPv6" logo below the navigation menu then your system is already using IPv6 and you are ready for the future of the interwebs! 2) If not, then maybe your Internet supplier is still only supporting the old IPv4 standard or your system has not been correctly configured to utilize the new standard. That's alright, for the next few years most servers will support both IPv6 and IPv4 - it will be a long time before we kill IPv4 entirely - no reason to panic! 3) If you can't see this message at all (hm...how are you reading this then?) then something is broken and the fact that we are advertising an IPv6 address makes your system fail in some way. In this case it may be a good idea to check up on why it is failing - since many sites will become IPv6 enabled like this during the next few years. You can post about your experience in this news thread. The test stops later today, but some DNS caches may cache the data until tomorrow. In case you like to access BURP via IPv6 you can always (also after this test) access it using this URL: http://ipv6.burp.renderfarming.net