Distributed Cloud Computing

[pdussart]

Dear 3D flow,

What do you think of Distributed Cloud Computing ?? (i.e. using computing capacity of other PCS across the cloud)

See example of [--removed--]

You "rent" external GPU capacity.

This might be useful for heavy and complex 3D models.

Is it legal from a 3D flow licensing viewpoint ? Feasable ? Advisable ? Risky ?

Regards, Philippe

[Andrea Alessi]

Hello Philippe,

you can indeed use virtual machines. From a licensing standpoint, it is absolutely allowed as long as you're not allowing access to third party users - as in, if you have a license for your company, of course you can have a colleague use zephyr on said machine. But you can't for example charge someone outside your organization to access your license by giving them remote access to the VM. This is covered by the eula in point 3. "permitted uses and restrictions" if you want more information (3b, 3d, 3g).

That said, there are multiple providers out there that provide GPU powered instances. We're agnostic,and of course you can load your license there - however, beware that if you kill the VM without closing zephyr gracefully, the lease won't be released, and thus you'll be locked out of your license. So make sure you gracefully exit Zephyr before killing the VM.

The only note I have, is that you must make sure to install the proper video driver (e.g. GRID) - please refer to the documentation of the desired chosen service to make sure you install correctly the proper driver.