What began as an interesting artistic exercise is now an indispensable tool. It's notable that twenty years after putting its first pixels on the screen RenderMan remains the benchmark for all rendering technology.

George Lucas
Chairman of Lucas Film

What's Tractor?

Tractor is Pixar's distributed processing solution for rendering and other network intensive applications. Derived from years of experience in managing the demands of the worlds largest render farms, Tractor is specifically engineered to address the extreme scalability and performance requirements of today's multi-core networks.
Tractor's queuing engine is capable of dispatching over 500 tasks per second. Tractor utilizes proven, open web standards and is highly customizable. Systems administrators can easily add Python extension modules to Tractor-Blades and customize the specifics of how various tasks are executed.

Functionally, Tractor consists of three components:

1. The Tractor-Engine maintains the central job queue and dispatches tasks.
2. The Tractor-Blade is a Python based execution server running on each remote node.
3. The Tractor-Dashboard is a customizable web browser user interface providing centralized control of the Tractor-Engine.
   
   

Full Integration with RenderMan RenderMan Studio includes out-of-box support for Tractor to facilitate job submissions directly from a session of Maya. Submit jobs locally or remotely, and monitor them with Tractor's Dashboard. For more information check out the Tractor workflow with RMS. 


Tractor 2 Highlights

• Powerful scripting interfaces
• Flexible resource-sharing controls
• Python module extensions
• Minimal computational footprint
• Streamlined installation 
• Major user interface enhancements 
• Open web standards
• HTML 5 support
  

System RequirementsTractor 2 is packaged as a single download for each operating system, containing all of the Tractor 2 components you will need, though each machine may only use a subset:
1) Tractor-Engine

Central job queue, installed on one host only
Linux 64-bit (gcc4.4), Mac OS X (10.8+)

2) Tractor-Blade
Task execution server, on render blades
Based on Python 2.7, for: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+.
3) Tractor-Dashboard
Web-based user interface, job browsing and control
Firefox, Safari, Chrome, IE11.  No platform-specific plug-ins required
4) Tractor-Spooler, and Tractor-Query
Job submission and advanced command line tools, on user workstations
Based on Python 2.7, for: Linux-64, Mac OS X 10.8+, and Windows 7+.