Backburner

The Backburner is a program included in many Autodesk programs. It is used for compiling, rendering, and performing other input-output tasks. Backburner serves as a queue manager for different distributed network and background processing tasks. It can be used to monitor, submit, and control different media I/O jobs and processes.

The Autodesk Backburner application consists of the following parts: Backburner Manager, Backburner Monitor, Backburner Server, Backburner Processing Engine, and Backburner Processing Node. Backburner Manager works by coordinating different tasks presented by Wiretap clients and assigning the tasks to the Wiretap servers. Backburner Monitor is used to control and manage the Backburner Manager while the Backburner Server serves as the job-processing tool used by Backburner that calls up the processing engine. The component responsible for the server-side tasks is the Backburner Processing Engine. This component is combined with the Backburner Server as adapters or plug-ins. The backburner Processing Node is the component that consists of the plug-ins/adapters, Backburner Server and processing engines.

The Backburner program is also capable of creating and managing render farms. Render farms are composed of groups of large machinery that are used for rendering tasks primarily to handle large files. The application assigns data to every machine, which is similar to downloading parts of a torrent file.

The application is compatible with 3DStudioMax, Inferno, Smoke, Burn, Flare, Maya, Flame, Lustre, Flint, WiretapCentral, Backdraft Conform and Cleaner. Most of these applications work with each other. Backburner may work simultaneously with different Autodesk applications.