Got some AURA news:
Wow! When can we expect this baby to be released :?:
-Matt
that looks great!
this looks very real.
can you network-render such a sequence,
or will it flicker?
whats the render times per frame?
There are render times on some of the animations. A little hard to read but I think they start at about 5 sec and go up to just under 30 sec a frame.
--Jon
You can use both DR and standard network render.
However, the rendering is only one step of the process. Before you can render you have to create the simulation and save it in a special cache file. Then you can render it many times from the cache file. The data in the cache is view-independent.
Usually creating the simulation is the longer process and the calculation times are quite high. Unfortunately these calculations cannot be distrubuted among many machines. Some parts of the calculations, however, can be multithreaded (so multi-cpu machines will benefit).
For the sequences we have put on the site, the rendering of the fire is quite fast. Rendering of the smoke on its own is also quite speedy, unless you want it to self-shadow from several lamps. But then self-shadowing looks so much cooler 
One of the things we are currently working on is a faster smoke shader that supports self-showing. I will try to post some model + render times for a sample sequence in a week or two.
We are planning the public beta to begin in about a month or so.
Do you know how much it will cost?