Renderfarm Setup Tips?

CarlosOlivaG4 asks: "We're in the process of acquiring and setting up a renderfarm, and I'm hoping the Slashdot community might light us up a little here. We'll use 6 to 8 nodes first, but would like to be able to expand it in the future." There was an earlier version of this question, but it dealt more with the hardware of the farm's nodes, rather than the network and software infrastructure on which these nodes would be based.

"In the hardware side, we still haven't made a choice between using AMD's Opteron or Apple's Xserve G5 (they have some very nice and price convenient cluster nodes which seem to be ideal for this kind of job), with Linux. As for the networking between them, is Gigaethernet enough or should we be going for Fiber? The software used to manage the render queues is another important point as well: I've been looking into Rush, and even though it's a commercial package, it works on all of the platforms we currently use (W2k/XP, Irix, OS X and Linux). But then there is also Dr. Queue, which is open source and is supported on at least the *NIX members of the aforementioned OS's. Other options include RenderPal and Pixar's RenderMan, but I would prefer an F/OSS alternative. Finally, it's worth noting that we'll be using the renderfarm for Maya and Adobe AfterEffects."

Comments

Cinelerra

[selfabuse]

You might want to check out Cinelerra. It has pretty good support for renderfarms. I built one out of scrap 300mhz machines, and it only took a weekend.

Our experiences

[Thagg]

We had a renderfarm for "The Chronicles of Riddick" of 40 boxes. Each box was a dual-proc Opteron.

We evaluated several render-queue management systems, and decided on Rush. The most persuasive arguments for using Rush were the very good experience we have heard from other users, and the simplicity of extending it to manage a variety of different tasks. I have to add Hammerhead to the list of happy customers. It did everything we could have hoped for. In particular, it was able to handle the inevitable crashing of machines pretty well.

While it's true that Rush is a proprietary, gotta-pay-for-it system; a robust render queue management system pays for itself very quickly in the ability to make your renferfarm productive. Perhaps a render queue manager is overkill when you have just 6 or 8 systems, but once you get up to 30 or 40 it is essential.

Our experience is all under Linux, but if you're going to be running After Effects that means that you're not going to be running Linux -- so there's not too much more I can help you with there. We did find that the dual Opterons worked much more efficiently than dual Xeons in multiprocessor rendering -- don't know about the Xserves, though. We were running mostly Maya, RenderMan, Shake, and our own in-house tools on the farm.

This farm is unfortunately powered down now that Riddick is done -- if you need some dual opterons, let me know at thad@hammerhead.com

Depends on your workstations

[BBStriker]

Hey

I've set up and administrated a number of farms over the years (doing it as I type. its.. what I do). One thing you really want to do, certainly with Maya's renderer, is to try to use the same OS and platform on your farm as you use on your user workstations. There can be subtle or even obvious differences in the render output between OS's, and since you'll have enough issues to deal with you'll want to keep cross-platform incompatabilities out of the mix. Please, trust me on this. Had to deal with Maya Irix/Win2k/Linux differences in the past.

As for queueing software, give Condor a look-see. Free and functional. I reverse-engineered a Perl version of it before they made their source available, and my version has been run quite successfully at several animation studios and an effects house over the years. It's a well architected system for distributed computing.

Feel free to contact me if you've got any other render system or management questions. I'm always interested in seeing how other studios approach the challenge.