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

I'm a Machead, but...

[Jonas the Bold]

Don't use macs. First off, you have less choice in renderers, and second, the hardware is more expensive. Rendering is grunt work. Buy cheap systems that you can upgrade more often, and run linux or something.

Macs are very nice hardware, but you really don't need that for rendering. For workstations they make sense, but for rendering you really want to have a lot of fast computers rather than nice computers.

Re:Small cluster

[Anonymous Coward]

Secondly, from your questions it is obvious you're no rendering farm guru so why did the task of planning/researching the configuration get assigned to you? You should ... find a small and focused SI who will propose you a better solution than you can come up on your own

This attitude bothers me, and not for the first time here on Slashdot. How the hell do you think those experts got to be experts? Do you think they just *poofed* into being with all their knowledge and skills already existent? No, at some point, they started with little or no knowledge of the subject and gradually accumulated enough knowledge and experience to become experts!

Sheeesh! If everybody listened to this advice they never would do anything new or different for fear of coming up with some sub-optimal solution.

Some Tips

[mnemonic_]

These are just some tips I've heard in my 4 years of experience.

Whichever processors you go with, make sure the entire farm uses the same type. Otherwise peculiar rendering differences might occur, in things like particles, hair/fur and fluids.

I suggest going with the Opterons just for the PC compatibility. While the CG industry is becoming more diverse hardware-wise, it is still dominated by PC's and to a much lesser extent SGI boxes (5 years ago it was all SGI). Using PC's keeps your options open. Perhaps someday you will find 3ds max and its included distributed rendreing software more suitable for a task, and that can only be used with PC's. Same goes with the Mental Ray and Brazil renderers and the Combustion compositing software. Macs just have not been widely used in the 3d graphics industry, and so the vast majority of 3d content creation software is PC and SGI only (Maya Unlimited is only available on PC and SGI, while a lower end wersion is on Mac). And VirtualPC cannot be used to emulate 3d hardware acceleration (and it shouldn't be used for anything processor intensive anyways), though this only applies to the hardware rendered viewports in the apps. Having only Macs would be risky, and could limit your capabilities significantly.

Pixar's PRMan (Photorealistic RenderMan) is a full blown renderer, not just something to help distribute render jobs. It is generally considered the best in the industry, though MentalRay and Brazil have gained significant followings. For a cheap but effective render queueing system, check out Smegde. Smedge was used by Manex Visual Effects for handling some of the effects shots in the Matrix trilogy. If you're running the Linux version of Maya (x86 only) it is not too difficult to distribute the render tasks yourself using shell scripts and the command-line renderer.

GB Ethernet should be fine, the bottleneck will be in the actual image processing not data transfer rates. 100Mb ethenet might even get the job done, thught I'd use GB for the added speed when copying large files. YMMV of course.

Overall I'd try to create a very flexible system, one that will definitely support the newest CG software down the road and one that ensures compatibility with everything, for those always short deadlines. Goodl luck with your rendering.