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render farm

A

artistream

n00b
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
62
i wasnt sure which category to put this under but i thought that "distributed computing" was most accurate for a question about render farms. i wanted to put together a makeshift render farm using regular dual core procs and other standard pc components. before i went further with this i had a few questions...

1: is this efficient? are the 3-4 boards that i am hoping to put together in this manor even help that much to how much it will cost?
2: since its just for distributing the computing, do i need a graphics card or graphics processor in each of the units?
3: if both 1 and 2 = green light, do i need to have a server edition OS installed on my main pc?

ill prob have more questions to come. thanks for any input.
 
mhouston said:
what exactly are you trying to do?
Click to expand...

QFT.

Questions 1, 2, and 3 cannot be answered until we know exactly what you're trying to do. Like what are you trying to render, what OS you'll be using, etc, etc, etc. In other words please be a bit more detailed. Also please provide the specs of the PC that you're currently, if you are, doing renders on.

With that said, you might want to take a look at this home-made render farm as a starting point for the costs as well as benefits of the hardware side:
http://helmer.sfe.se/
 
even though this is something i wouldnt do, seeing that system you linked Danny, is bad ass.. man i wish i had that thing in my room.. :( though id love to see that guys 3rd design thats suppose to do 3 PFlops actualy happen, that thing would be SWEET!
 
Yeah, I'd be somewhat interested in this "render farm" deal also ;). With my somewhat limited experience with PC's, the only thing I've ever heard discussions about "render farms" was in graphics, of which I have little interest (other than "CUDA" capable VGA cards to DC with :rolleyes:). I'm sure there are other applicable uses for render farms, I just am not familiar with them. :confused:

Folding and WCGing for the CURE
 
I use Deadline Renderfarm (FranticFilms.com) for our Maya, After Effects, and Houdini Renders. Its repository can even be hosted from a regular XP machine if you want. It uses windows file sharing to distribute work and gather frames, but remember, max 10 congruent connections without using server ed.
I believe you can demo their software on 3 machines without buying a license.

 
If you're willing to look at Open Source tools, linuxmovies has everything you could ever need from light weight perl scripts all the way up to full featured Rederman compatible toolkits. They list free and commercial tools, modelers, audio tools, paint tools, renderers, queue tools, etc. Linux is good enough for Pixar, it should be good enough for what you're doing.

But, as has already been said, with a little more info as to what you're planning, we can offer more useful suggestions.
 
i knew there was another question that i was needing to put down. im doing lots of video editing which means lots of transcoding time and i was looking for a way to speed up that process. and this would be my intro to the whole render farm side of computing so the im starting at ground zero. with that said, you guys can go ahead and unload on which OS would be better, or just the pros/cons of each. im sure there are tuts i can find on how to build one but if you guys know of a particularly well written one that would be great. so basically, i am your nerdy ball of clay, mold me in which ever directions is the best, as i have no bias or preference. thanks guys!
 
artistream said:
i knew there was another question that i was needing to put down. im doing lots of video editing which means lots of transcoding time and i was looking for a way to speed up that process. and this would be my intro to the whole render farm side of computing so the im starting at ground zero. with that said, you guys can go ahead and unload on which OS would be better, or just the pros/cons of each. im sure there are tuts i can find on how to build one but if you guys know of a particularly well written one that would be great. so basically, i am your nerdy ball of clay, mold me in which ever directions is the best, as i have no bias or preference. thanks guys!
Click to expand...

I have tried Sony Vegas 8 Pro with it's distributed rendering and found it was a waste to time on H264.

What happens is that the video is fed to all the computers on the network in 12MB chunks, rendered and sent back. After all the rendering is done, which is quite a bit faster, the host machine has to stitch it all together by bacsically just re-rendering the whole thing which in turn takes just as much time as if the host just rendered it all by itself.

The key to this is to do a network render job instead of a distributed render job. Network rendering sends the entire job to another PC while the host PC is free to do whatever such as edit another video.

Oh yeah the OS was WIndows XP clients and Windows Vista 64 for the host.
 
If you are just going to be transcoding video (encoding to h264 / mpeg2 etc.) it will be cheaper/easier/faster to just build a new intel i7 box and just use a multi-threaded encoder rather than stuffing around with a distributed network as Met-AL says.
 
thanks for the input guys, it really helped. ive been wanting to start on an i7 build anyways, so i think that might be the way to go for me!
 
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