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

Slave Labour

[windside]

This is a bit off-topic, but William Gibson put forth an interesting idea about rednering farms in his most recent novel, Pattern Recognition. [This is something of a spoiler, so if you are planning on reading the book, stop reading.]

At one point in the book, the main character discovers a huge rendering farm in Russia that is staffed entirely by white-collar criminals who are "doing time". Since Russian prisons are a well-known hotebed of communicable diseases, this "Dream Factory" (as it is called) is referred to as the only prison in Russia that prisonners are trying to get inside. They are forced to work all day, but in exchange they can live comfortably without fear of the infection (or some other grisly fate) that would befall them in an ordinary prison.

Personally, I don't find this idea so far-fetched, especially in places like Russia or even the USA where the prison systems are under tremendous strain and there is a huge amount of untapped labour that would likely be happy to work in exchange for a guarantee of safety and sanitary conditions.

Dearest AC,

[beantowne]

You know, some of us aren't here because of the oh-so-important /. karma. Many are here to keep themselves informed and educated. How's about giving the guy the benefit of the doubt and go render yerself a chill-pill? Take note: I'm logged in and not afraid of the big bad flamebait mod.

Re:selfabuse is krama whore master!! Bow before hi

[selfabuse]

So, get someone with mod points to mod me down. I don't lose sleep at night over my slashdot karma.

Be careful

[Catamaran]

Be careful how you configure your network or you may end up with something like this.

Hiring Competent People?

[drewzhrodague]

You could also hire competent unemployed systems people to help out -- like myself!