I don't know what you mean by "a few" frames per day, but it sounds like you have a misconception about how it works. Typically many, many thousands of frames a

I don't know what you mean by "a few" frames per day, but it sounds like you have a misconception about how it works. Typically many, many thousands of frames are rendered every day, and most of those are rendered multiple times as artists iterate. The unit of parallelization for renders is always the frame. On a machine with multiple cores each core will render tiles in parallel, but across machines jobs are split up by frame. This is both because it's the simplest type of distribution for people to understand (machine goes bad? You lose one frame, not arbitrary pixels in an image). But also because it's most efficient for a single machine to read all the data for a single frame instead of multiple machines requesting the same data repeatedly across the network. I think people tend to underestimate just how massive the geometry and scene description files are for a typical feature and how much of the work involves managing the storage and network efficiency.