This year, Tech.Ed broke the keynote into 2 distinct audiences, IT Pro and Developer. One of the most impressive demo’s during the developer keynote was from GreenButton. CTO of Green Button, Dave Fellows showed off how a large 3D rending job can be distributed across Azure to perform incredibly time expensive compute tasks, in a matter of seconds rather than minutes.
During the demo attendees seen a complete 3D rendering drawn block by block in just 20 seconds, a task that would typically take around 30 minutes. This was achieved by distributing the workload across a number of high powered servers, but because the compute hours spent was low, the cost of using this extreme horsepower amounts to very little.
GreenButton has plugins for major modelling applications like Blender, as well as a SDK to allow developers to integrate with their existing applications. With a simple elegant web front end, jobs are not only managed, but also costed. Green Button provides a cost back to the users of just how much that task cost, so there’s no waiting for an end of the month bill.
This kind of immediate horsepower at an affordable rate will fundamentally transform the way design and animation firms work. Wether it be creating the next Pixar movie or working out the fluid dynamics of an F1 car, GreenButton on top of Windows Azure is making a massive impact in the economics of business.
I got a chance to sit down with Fellows and discuss the New Zealand origined company, to discuss GreenButton at Microsoft’s Tech.Ed conference.
More info @ http://www.greenbutton.net/
