Swarm is an extremely flexible job distribution system that is currently used to accelerate Unreal Engine 3’s new global illumination system, Unreal Lightmass, with outstanding results. Designed in to accelerate lighting computations, Swarm can manage clusters of computers of mixed brands, configurations, and performance levels, automatically distributing tasks on-demand and employing a transparent distributed cache system that allows for dramatically increased performance.
Think of what Swarm does as if it were creating a virtual, 100s-of-cores system. Computations that can be performed in parallel will be distributed to the entire network of systems available, multiplying performance many times over, bringing something extremely time-consuming, like global illumination, into the once-thought-impossible realm of iterative development.
Swarm is configured and managed entirely through a visual interface that provides detailed information about jobs in progress, including both local and remote agents participating in the job, and color-coded activity per worker thread on all agents.
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Distributed Computing
Unreal Swarm is a massively scalable job distribution system optimized for high-speed networks of multi-core PCs.
Developed to power UDK’s global illumination solution, Swarm speeds up the process by telling the computer what jobs to do and when to do them. By delegating the workload, it makes the process of global illumination much faster by transparently spreading out applications over your entire network.
