BioWare - InGame Tech Licensing for Dragon Age @ ShackNews & Gamasutra

Shack News  provides a little information on some new in-game tech licensed by Bioware for it's long anticipated PC RPG, Dragon Age, as well as for Bioware's other projects in development. There's also a quote from Dragon Age programmer Peter Woytiuk:

PipelineFX's Qube! is the latest piece of software to be added to BioWare's ever-increasing stable of development tools, the two companies have announced.

Described as a "distributed processing and render farm management system" that enhances "productivity through pipeline acceleration," Qube! will be used in the creation of future BioWare releases, including its long-known return to PC role-playing, Dragon Age.

Recently purchased by EA, BioWare is best known for the Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights series of PC RPGs, Mass Effect (X360), and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (PC, Xbox). Among other projects, it is currently working on a Sonic the Hedgehog RPG for Nintendo DS and an untitled MMO, heavily rumored to be set in the Knights of the Old Republic universe.
"We were able to integrate Qube! into our pipeline in less than a week and immediately started seeing results," said Dragon Age principal programmer Peter Woytiuk. "Qube! has given our artists more time to produce and iterate on content, which is key to creating the next generation of BioWare games."

Gamasutra has a little more detail on the tech itself:

 ...Qube’s features include cross-platform support, fully exposed C++, Perl and Python APIs, client-server architecture for scalability, global resource tracking, stable MySQL database backend for data retention and production tracking, floating shared license management to maximize use of servers and desktops, and customizable job dependencies and priorities to handle complex asset dependencies.

Qube ships with an array of custom jobtypes for 2D and 3D applications, including Maya, 3ds Max and others. Each jobtype contains a submission GUI integrated into the application itself, a submission form for the queue management GUI, a command line submission tool, and a backend execution module specifically developed to interface directly with the application.