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

High Performance Computing Perspective

[Anonymous Coward]

I manage a large Linux cluster that is used for a wide variety of tasks, including running Renderman. Our nodes are dual Xeon 2.4 GHz with 2 GB RAM and they are more than sufficient for the design group's rendering needs (primarily Maya). Our scheduler (OpenPBS) lets them request up to 64 processors at a time, which, I'm told by their IT guy, works well with their Renderman maitre de.

There is a fiber interface (Myrinet) to each node used by the MPI crowd, but our rendering group doesn't use it; they seem content with the performance of Ethernet over copper. Your needs may be different, of course, but latency isn't really an issue for rendering, and copper should provide all the bandwidth you need.

I'm not knowledgable regarding all the software packages you list there, but I'm wondering if any of them would really take advantage of a 64-bit kernel (either on Opteron or G5-PPC970). Of course you can put a PPC version of Linux on the Xserve, but not without sacrificing nearly all Apple-provided management. If you expand the cluster to a large number of nodes, or even if you keep a small number of nodes but place it in a remote location, Xserve running Linux would be painful to manage (no remote power-off/-on, remote console problems). Xserve is shiny and has the requisite blue LED's, but and AMD or Intel box (from the right vendor) would be much easier to manage remotely.

Deadline Render Queue (beta)

[bhouston]

At Frantic Films we have over the past year developed our own network rendering solution: Deadline. Our solution has just recently entered a beta testing period thus if people are so inclined one can have a look at the current product (screenshots) and possibly download a trial version (download page). We used Deadline on a number of recent feature films including Scooby Doo 2 and Paycheck.

We did this because we primarily use Discreet's 3dsmax (with Brazil and V-Ray) and Eyeon's Digital Fusion. We have found that most existing render farm solutions do not support these two packages very well -- thus we decided to develop our own custom solution. We also support After Effects, Alias|Maya, AIR and other RenderMan compliant rendering packages.

Of interest to the general Slashdot crowd may be that this Deadline Render Management Solution is based on the open source (BSD License) Exocortex C# library originally released with this C# 3D Engine. Deadline is built with C# in the hopes that using Mono we will be able to start supporting Linux with minimal extra effort.

I'll be reading all the posts on this Slashdot thread but I would also appreciate any direct feedback on our current beta product. We also found solutions such as Rush and Smedge to be less than user friendly in many respects. Thus we have tried as best as we could to increase a 3D package that is not well supported by most render farm management solutions -- except for Discreet's Backburner (which we found not that that scalable.)