My problem

• Simulations were expensive and slow.
• I needed a way to spread jobs across idle machines.
• A lightweight shared-filesystem scheduler was good enough.

The studio's problem

• Frantic was using Autodesk Backburner on a roughly 60-machine render farm.
• It was unreliable enough that someone worked nights just to restart it when it crashed.
• Failed overnight renders meant missed deadlines and wasted artist time.