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Building a Render Farm?

Posted by Cliff on from the a-task-for-that-beowulf-cluster-in-the-basement dept.

Dark Bard asks: "What is the best configuration for a rendering machine. Given the variety of chips and components what are the best options balancing cost verses speed. I've been running Lightwave and plan to shift soon to Maya. AMD chips seem to be rated as a bit faster for rendering and they cost less, as well. Given the number of types of RAM available, what are the advantages of each verses cost? Should ECC be considered? What about motherboards? Integrated video would be ideal but it would have to be adequate to run the software. Is there any advantage to running the new 64 bit processors? Should you consider dual chips? What about operating system? Lightwave won't run on Linux but Maya will. How well do the major operating systems compare when used for this purpose?"

4 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Dear Slashdot... do my work for me please... by foooo · · Score: 3, Insightful

    At times like this it's hard to resist kharma whoring... so I won't.

    Dear Slashdot,
    Please do my research for me. I can't possibly use google and look up the 309830983 gazillion studies on cluster/render farm configurations.
    I won't/can't give you any specific information related to budget, my personal experience with hardware, the team to be working on the project (it could be just me... or 500 people) and the importance of data integrity (if I lose a week of work it might end my life... or I might not care).

    -clueless reader

    Dear Clueless,
    Well, if your budget is a billion dollars why not just buy Pixar? They have the whole render farm thing figured out.

    If your budget is any thing less than that try looking for open source, GNU, freeware, shareware, free for non-commercial use renderfarmy stuff and run it on AMD based Linux boxes.

    Hard drives aren't so important on the individual machines. Get a decent raid on a server machine that will support the number of computers in the render farm. Use 100-1000 mbit ethernet (unless you want to spend a fortune). Get at least 256 mb of ram in each box rendering is memory intensive.

    If noise is a concern, build a seperate room or building even.. cause the more computers you have the more it's going to start sounding like a server room and less like a place hospitible to human life.

    Take a look at learning Blender instead (or in addition to) Maya. Learning to use special rendering software like BMRT would also be cool. BMRT, which is free for non-commercial use, churns out very good images but is very slow. Renderman is the most popular and the most expensive. It's fast too but there are some things it can't do such as global illumination, which BMRT can do. (I'm not sure about the new release of Renderman, though.) There's also Entropy, a fast BMRT, but not free.

    All software I've mentioned works for Linux.
    For more resources, check out these links:

    http://www.blender3d.com
    http://www.aliaswavefr ont.com
    http://www.linux.org/apps/all/Graphics/3D _Modellin g.html
    http://www.linuxmovies.org

    By the way it took me 5 minutes to find this on google and I know jack shit about animation... my only limited experience was fooling around with good 'ol POV-RAY.

    For god sakes! If your'e going to ask a bunch of very smart people questions that demand detailed answers... provide detail on your questions.

    It makes me if moderators have any standards at all for ask slashdot items. (Why do I ask when I already know the answer!!)

    ~foooo

    1. Re:Dear Slashdot... do my work for me please... by Atzanteol · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes ladies and Gentleman, you too can be a pretentious slashdot asshole! All you need to do is:

      1) Bitch about "easy" ask-slashdot questions. After all, you *do* know everything don't you?
      2) Answer the "easy" question with vague mumblings about "google", "open source", and a few links to stuff that won't answer the question (but it looks like you really know your stuff if you do).
      3) Bitch (there's a lot of that if you're going to be pretentious) about the "stupid" moderators and editors. They are, afterall, morons aren't they?

      Yessir, just follow these three simple rules, and you too will find yourself modded +5 insightful whereas all your detractors will be -1 troll!

      --
      "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

      - Charles Darwin
    2. Re:Dear Slashdot... do my work for me please... by Atzanteol · · Score: 2, Insightful

      But the questioner wasn't asking about *software* so much as experience with hardware. That's the *point* of asking questions. To get others experiences with things. Sure, I can google for what runs under Linux, but which is the best way?

      --
      "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"

      - Charles Darwin
  2. wtf?! by Beatbyte · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Should ECC be considered?

    If you're in charge of building a rendering farm, your company is in trouble. If you haven't even figured out that the RAM MUST be ECC, you shouldn't be even aloud near the farm.

    --
    Get paid to code OSS