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"Antique" Computers Resurrected As Rendering Farm?

Posted by Cliff on from the it's-alive!-it's-alive! dept.

Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"

17 comments

  1. Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by shrike · · Score: 5

    Hi

    Those Indigos, while nice, aren't exactly real performers anymore (especially if they've still got R3000 CPUs). A modern day CPU, such as an AMD Athlon, will run circles around a bunch of those SGI boxes. If you want performance, buy an AMD Duron or even a Thunderbird. A Pentium III would do nicely too.

    However, if you're into this kind of stuff (clusters, etc), this is going to be a lot of fun!

    You could use a free raytracer, such as POVray or BMRT, which should give you excellent quality output. You should still be able to find IRIX 5.3 binaries of both programs.
    You'll need to use some other program to convert your CAD files to one of the formats supported by these raytraces. There are several programs that can do this.

    1. Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by Howie · · Score: 1

      Indeed - I have a lowend (R4600PC/133) Indy, and while it's lovely for UI things (the UI is written with this spec of system in mind) and X, now it has a bunch of RAM you get to notice the speed of the system. When I first got it, it spent it's time swapping, but now the disk is silent, so it's pure "thinking time" when it takes a few seconds to figure out manpages, or compile code or whatever. I think I figured out that my Indy was roughly P100 speed from the specmarks tables, although it has rather different ratios of integer to floating point performance.

      I do have the 'top-of-the-range' graphics option though, and that is not really anything to write home about, even on the basic gouraud-shaded stuff it ought to do well. There's something about these boxes though - as soon as the O2s are below about $1200 (soon), I'll be looking again :)

      The R3000 Indigos (there were R4000 ones too) ran at 33Mhz, IIRC. I would imagine you're looking at fast 386 style speeds.

      Try http://www.specbench.org/cgi-bin/osgresults
      to find out more. I couldn't see any SGIs that old in the listings, but other things with the same class of CPU were: Decstation 3000 series (and 5000 I think) and the MIPS Magnum. For compute comparisons they'd probably be useful. Then find the Intel part with similar speeds (it'll probably be two - one for FP and a different one for int).

      Since rendering (in a farm situation) is pretty much pure computation, I would have thought it wasn't worth your while - although it *would* look nice, and it'd sound impressive to PHB types - one small thing: make sure your Indigo's come *with* keyboards and mice - you see a lot of people on the newsgroups looking for those things - they're not standard PS/2 ones.

      [anyone have an R4400SC/200 module they want to get rid of? ;-) ]

      --
      "don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
    2. Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by photon317 · · Score: 1
      Search freshmeat.net for PVMPov, which does povray rendering across multiple machines using standard PVM libraries

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      11*43+456^2
    3. Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by dan_bethe · · Score: 1

      Time to get ahold of The Bodoman.

      ===

    4. Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance by Clan+Hanna · · Score: 1

      and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing

      ... or anything else for that matter. I am amazed at how many people forget to read the postings! Forget other hardware, we didn't ask about other hardware (I say "we" because I am a member of this fraternity). What do you suggest we do with what we've got?


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      I'm sick and tired of being responsible for the preservation of the universe and its outlying suburbs.
  2. Well... by HerrNewton · · Score: 1

    Like everything, it's a bang-for-the-buck equation. Simply put, can you get better hardware for the same price, or equivalent hardware for the same price?

    Slightly off-topic, but don't knock aged hardware. At a company (printing) I used to work for, we kept a Quadra840AV and a Quadra950 around, running MacOS 7.5.5, Quark 4.x, and Photoshop 3.x for those just-in-case times. What we found, though, is that the two, old '040 based Macs were perfectly usable as production machines and, oddly, felt zippier than our new PowerMac 7500s at times. Weird, huh? (This was several years ago, btw.)

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    Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
    1. Re:Well... by 11223 · · Score: 2
      User interface speed has nothing to do with clock speed. My Pilot is zippier than my main computer, but that's because my computer has abstraction layer on top of layer on top of... you get the picture.

      Usability is possible on outdated hardware, except where computational neccesity overrides.

    2. Re:Well... by HerrNewton · · Score: 1

      The 040 hardware and 7500s were running the same version of the MacOS. I neglected to mention that, so it's my fault. Also both the 040 and PPC systems were loaded with 64MB of RAM and that does, admittedly, go a lot farther on 680x0 than PPC.

      BUT, I do know what you mean about the user interface sucking cycles--*cough* MacOS X. Soon as Flash, Photoshop (sorry--doin' color prepress and the GIMP is just not quite there yet), Illustrator, Quark, and Director run on Linux, I'll switch--once someone writes a friggin' tool to convert my fonts. I'm not parting with a few thousand dollars of typefaces. Makes Linux a very non-free solution for me.

      Rambling....

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      Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
  3. Network rendering by superlame · · Score: 1

    Well, you could use POVRay or BMRT. Those will do network rendering. Just search google for information on using those for network rendering.

    You probably will need to come up with some custom scripts to convert DXF files into the proper format. In my experience, DXF files are a very poor way to transport models. If you are doing work in Autocad, then I recommend finding a DWG converting.

    --
    -- Superlame http://catpro.dragonfire.net/joshua/
  4. Tried Hash? by plastickiwi · · Score: 1

    Hash's Animation Master is a full-featured 3-D modeling, animation and rendering package with an available render farm option for only $700. You might want to check it out.

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    -- He's fantastic, made of plastic....
    1. Re:Tried Hash? by Spiral+Man · · Score: 1

      this isnt going to run on those machines though, only on win32/mac...

      --
      "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!" --Douglas Adams, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
  5. Re:OT: Old 486's by mks113 · · Score: 1

    I'm running a Compaq 486/66 with RH6.1 as a web/mail server and a firewall for my workstation. It hasn't had a monitor for six months! I've got an ADSL line and notice no server induced slow-downs unless I run any CGIs.

    Install a standard Linux with IP Masq and sell them as servers/firewalls. Lots of people are running home networks.

  6. old indigos by cryptozoologist · · Score: 1

    as an added bonus you won't have to heat your fraternity in the winter if you have a dozen or so indigos rendering ;) probably the best thing you can do with them is play bz (battle zone knockoff) over the network

  7. OT: Old 486's by tolan's+my+name · · Score: 1

    While we're talking about old computers i have access to virtually unlimited supplies of 486's.
    (mostly dx2/66s, no more than 16mb ram given the availible simms and slots; disks in the 400 - 600 mb capacity range)
    One is well on its way to being a modem router/firewall. Anouther is being used a a print server, and running a disk used for network back-up.

    .........Anybody have idea's as to anything i can reasonably do with the rest? (i can get 10Mbit ethernet with most of them)
    &#9786

    1. Re:OT: Old 486's by biftek · · Score: 2
      Check out mosix.org, they've got some (free, GPL iirc) software which splits the CPU load amongst a network of machines. You don't have to recompile your software you're running, any software which supports multiprocessor (ie threads i think) will work. Could be a nice addition of a bit of speed for CPU intensive tasks.

      Of course the power bills might be a bit high.....

  8. Blender has network support! (soon) by paRcat · · Score: 2

    We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support

    Go to the Anim menu, look for a button that says Render Daemon. There's your network support. It's even going to be open source when released. If you can hold out for that, you should. Blender is one of the best ways to go, IMHO.


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    you may quote me

  9. Power use by bluGill · · Score: 2

    Back when distirbtued.net first started (rc5-56, and a ppro-200 was a mean machine) I calculated that enough 386s to equal one ppro-200 would use enough more electrisity that in a year you would have been better off buying the ppro.

    Of course if you want the geek factor, or don't pay utilities, then enjoy. Otherwise think twice about a ne machine.