Backburner Terminology
 
 
 

Familiarity with the following terminology will help you to understand this guide.

Term Definition
Backburner The Autodesk distributed job management system for execution of rendering and I/O jobs in the background.
Job A set of one or more tasks submitted to Backburner for processing, such as a 3ds Max scene, Flame Batch setup, or background I/O job.
Task The smallest unit of work that can be sent to a render node for processing. This could be a single frame, a portion of a frame, or an entire background I/O job, depending on the job type and the creative application submitting it.
Block A group of tasks sent to a render node as a unit. For example, when you submit a Burn job from Smoke, each render node normally receives a number of frames for processing at once.
Backburner Manager Coordinates jobs submitted by creative applications and delegates them to the Backburner servers on the Backburner network.
Backburner Windows Monitor

Backburner Web Monitor

Front-end interfaces for management and control of the Backburner Manager.
Backburner Server The job-processing component of Backburner, residing on each render node, that invokes the local processing engine.
Adapter The means by which job-specific processing engines are integrated into Backburner.

Sits between the Backburner server and the processing engine.

Processing Engine The server-side process responsible for carrying out the tasks assigned by the Backburner Manager—rendering animations, scenes and frames, or performing background I/O. A renderer is a particular kind of processing engine.
Server Group A named collection of Backburner servers.