Welcome to IT4Innovations & Blender
Exploring high-performance computing and advanced rendering technologies.
High-Performance Rendering on Supercomputing Infrastructure
High-performance computing (HPC) is extensively used in computer graphics, particularly for image synthesis and the rendering of complex virtual scenes. Such rendering workflows have broad practical applications, including mechanical engineering, industrial and product design, and the entertainment industry.
To significantly accelerate rendering workloads, supercomputing resources can be employed to parallelize and scale the computation beyond the capabilities of local hardware.
Rendering-as-a-service
We provide a Python add-on for Blender, BRaaS-HPC, which converts a standard user-defined rendering task into a dedicated high-performance computing (HPC) job. The add-on functions as an SSH-based remote client, enabling transparent offloading of rendering workloads to supercomputing infrastructures.
The BRaaS-HPC add-on is available at: https://github.com/It4innovations/braas-hpc
Interactive Rendering and Computation on HPC Systems
We also provide BRaaS-HPC-Interactive, a Python add-on for Blender that enables interactive rendering and computational workflows on HPC clusters. Building on the core BRaaS-HPC functionality, this extension supports real-time interactive sessions with HPC resources, allowing users to execute custom commands and scripts directly on compute nodes while continuing to work within the Blender environment.
The BRaaS-HPC-Interactive add-on is available at: https://github.com/It4innovations/braas-hpc-interactive
Usage & User Projects
Chora by Gaia Radić
(2025)
Dejvický kampus by Michal Faltýnek
(2025)
Spring by Blender Studio
(2019)
Agent 327: Operation Barbershop by Blender Studio
(2017)
Scientific Visualization
Electric Motor
Volume rendering of velocity field in Blender Cycles
(2024)
Ball
Volume rendering of vortex Q-criterion in Blender Cycles
(2024)
Electric Motor - Interactive
Interactive remote volume rendering in Blender Cycles
(2024)
Train Simulator
Physically based rendering of virtual training scenes for machine learning in Blender Cycles.
(2022)
CT Volume Rendering
Computed tomography data were converted to OpenVDB and rendered using Blender Cycles.
(2022)
Moana Scene
Demonstration of GPU-accelerated rendering for massive production scenes in Blender Cycles.
(2022)
Publications
Out-of-core aware multi-GPU rendering for large-scale scene visualization
(2026) Future Generation Computer Systems
Workflow for high-quality visualisation of large-scale CFD simulations by volume rendering
(2025) Advances in Engineering Software
Multi-GPU Accelerated Rendering of Massive Scenes with Out-of-Core Support for CPU Memory
(2025) Lecture Notes in Computer Science, PPAM2024
High Performance Visualization for Astrophysics and Cosmology
(2025) Proceedings - 33rd Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing, PDP 2025
Speed Up of Volumetric Non-Local Transform-Domain Filter Utilising HPC Architecture
(2023) Journal of Imaging
Interactive Rendering with Blender Cycles for Virtual Reality using High Performance Computing Clusters
(2019) AIP Conference Proceedings
Energy consumption evaluation of Blender's image renderer in HPC environment
(2019) Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, GPU and Cloud Computing for Engineering, Civil-Comp Press
Implementation of BM3D Filter on Intel Xeon Phi for Rendering in Blender Cycles
(2018) Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Rendering in Blender Cycles using MPI and Intel® Xeon Phi™
(2017) ACM International Conference Proceeding Series
Acceleration of Blender Cycles path-tracing engine using Intel® many integrated core architecture
(2015) Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Presentations
Bridging Cosmological Simulations and High-Quality Visualizations using HPC resources
(2025) 9th Users' Conference of IT4Innovations
Presented by P. Strakos
Jak dostat slona do mixeru
(2023) CZSK Blender Conference
Presented by M. Jaros
GPU-accelerated distributed rendering of massive scenes in Cycles
(2022) Blender Conference 2022 in Amsterdam
Presented by M. Jaros
Rendering on an HPC cluster with RAAS
(2019) 3rd Users Conference of IT4Innovations 2019 in Ostrava
Presented by P. Strakos
Cycles: High Performance Blending
(2019) Blender Conference 2019 in Amsterdam
Presented by L. Riha
Scientific data visualization using Blender & COVISE
(2019) Blender Conference 2019 in Amsterdam
Presented by P. Strakos
Blender in HPC Environment
(2018) Blender Conference 2018 in Amsterdam
Presented by L. Riha
Rendering in Blender Cycles using AVX-512 Vectorization
(2018) IXPUG Europe Spring 2018 in Bologna
Presented by M. Jaros and P. Strakos
Rendering in Blender Cycles Using Intel® Xeon Phi™ (Code Named Knights Landing)
(2017) Intel® HPC Developer Conference 2017 in Denver
Presented by L. Riha
Selected Intel® Xeon Phi™ Accelerated Libraries developed at IT4Innovations
(2017) 6th Annual Conference of IT4Innovations and 1st Users Conference of IT4Innovations 2017 in Ostrava
Presented by L. Riha and M. Merta and M. Jaros
Acceleration of Blender Cycles Render Engine using Intel® Xeon Phi™
(2017) IXPUG/EMEA 2017 at University of Cambridge
Presented by M. Merta
The Fundamentals: How to accelerate Blender with the Intel® Xeon Phi™ coprocessors
(2016) IXPUG/EMEA 2016 in Ostrava
Presented by M. Jaros
Posters
Scalable Volume Rendering of Billion-Cell CFD Simulations Using VFX Pipelines
(2025) Proceedings - SIGGRAPH 2025
Presented by P. Strakos
Toward Scalable Voxelization of Meshes with High Growth Rate
(2022) SC22 in Dallas
Presented by M. Hrabánková
Blender based Rendering-as-a-Service Platform for High Performance Computing Clusters
(2018) High-Performance Graphics 2018 in Vancouver
Presented by M. Jaros
Energy Consumption Optimization of Rendering in Blender Cycles on x86 Architectures
(2018) High-Performance Graphics 2018 in Vancouver
Presented by L. Riha
Interactive and Offline Rendering in Blender Cycles Using MPI and Intel® Xeon Phi™ Offload
(2016) SC16 in Salt Lake City
Presented by L. Riha
Projects
InnovAIte Slovakia: Illuminating Pathways for AI‑Driven Breakthroughs
Generating data from virtual environments in Blender
(2025-...)
REFRESH: Research Excellence For REgion Sustainability and High-tech Industries
Visualization of a laboratory for hydrogen production research
(2024-...)
SPACE: Scalable Parallel Astrophysical Codes for Exascale
Processing and visualization of A&C data in Blender
(2024-...)
TACR: Railway simulator for obsacle detection project
Generating data from virtual environments in Blender
(2020-2022)
About Us
Lubomír Říha
Head of Infrastructure Research Lab
lubomir.riha@vsb.cz
Specialist in HPC cluster computation.
Petr Strakoš
Senior Researcher
petr.strakos@vsb.cz
Focused on scientific visualization, ML and rendering services.
Milan Jaroš
Researcher
milan.jaros@vsb.cz
Expert in GPU acceleration and path-tracing for massive scenes.