PipelineFX Ships Qube! 4.0

PipelineFX announced the release of Qube! 4.0, the newest release of the company’s flagship render farm management software for film production and game development. Announced at Siggraph 2005, the new version of Qube! offers enhanced support for applications, including Maya, Softimage, 3ds Max, Shake, NUKE, mental ray, and compatibility with the latest version of Apple’s operating system, OS X Tiger. It has an enhanced graphical user interface (GUI) called Qubic, which allows easy configuration of the Qube! Supervisor. The new version has a proxy user mode for Windows Workers, which simplifies job execution by having the number of users to be under the control of one Qube! administrator. A multi-threaded Worker improves communication between Worker and Supervisor and increases reliability via a self-healing mechanism. The software generates automatic email reports when jobs finish, which allows users to "fire and forget" jobs. There is a host order job execution, which allows the Supervisor to favor hosts with certain characteristics, such as CPU speed. Finally, the license global resources are tied to an external program, which reduces the number of lost jobs due to insufficient license resources at job execution time.