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.

Re:Cinelerra

[selfabuse]

And here is the link I forgot.

node deployment: g4u!

[hubertf]

Check out g4u for deploying your render machines - it's a image based disk cloning tool that uses DHCP and FTP and which doesn't care what you run on your clients. (g4u itself is based on NetBSD, but that doesn't matter for the application).

I've used g4u to setup a ~50 node video rendering cluster, see my webpage on the Regensburg Marathon Cluster.

Enjoy!

- Hubert

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:I'm a Machead, but...

[mcdesign]

But if you are using Shake the OS X version is $2999.00 or $2000 dollars cheaper than the Linux version. The OS X version also comes with unlimited render only nodes for free. Each Linux render node costs $1499.

So for say 10 computers:
Cluster node version of Xserver 10 @ $2,999.00 = $29,990*
Shake 1 @ $2,999 = $2,999
Total = $ 32 989

Now the Linux version will cost:
Shake 1 @ $4,999 = $4,999
Render nodes 9 @ = $13 491
Total costs software = $18 490

This leaves you with $14 499 to buy 10 x86 boxes or $1449.90 each. Those G5's don't seem so expensive after all.

* Yes I know it will need more RAM but so will the Linux boxes.

Software?

[m0rph3us0]

What render queue products are supported by your pieces of software? Why don't you try a few of them?
I'm sure a demo can be arranged.
I wouldn't go blindly marching in the direction of FOSS especially in something that is valuable enough to setup a renderfarm for.

Most importantly, find out what the people who will be using the software like and dislike about each package. And what works for them. If it saves you $30 per hour times 5 people software and hardware cost become insignifigant after one work week.

The biggest renderfarm in the world is useless if your people can't use it. Always remember that software is only good in its ability to meet the goals of the organization it supports.

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

Re:Our experiences

[NanoGator]

Welp, your post sparked some debate here at the office. I'm at a small studio making a full length animated movie. One aspect of it we've been chewing on is what to get in terms of render farm down the road. I just had a few questions for you, if you don't mind:

1.) The words 'dual' and 'Opteron' both surprised us. We were kind of under the impression that maybe single proc machines would be better for a render farm. We were really curious why dual was chosen over single. Did the extra cost end up being worth it?

2.) You mentioned that Opteron was more efficient than Xeons. I just had to ask: Was the particular software you were using particularly tuned to Opteron (i.e. 64-bit?) or was the 32-bit side of it just pleasant to work with? Any more insight you can share with me about the use of Opteron would be most helpful.

3.) Did you guys end up buying a bunch of machines from a place like IBM or something, or was it more like "we bought the components and assembled ourselves..?" If it's the former, how'd you like the service?

4.) Any regrets or things you'd do differently next time around?

5.) Why are you getting rid of the machines used for Riddick? Or did I read that wrong?

Appreciated,

NanoG

Re:Our experiences

[Thagg]

Good questions

1.) The words 'dual' and 'Opteron' both surprised us. We were kind of under the impression that maybe single proc machines would be better for a render farm. We were really curious why dual was chosen over single. Did the extra cost end up being worth it?

The computers are relatively cheap -- it's render licenses (especially for RenderMan) that are expensive. With the newest version of RenderMan, Pixar has deigned to let us use the two processors of a dual-processor machine with a single license. This lowers the cost of rendering by about 60%, if the machine rendered twice as fast with dual processors. In fact, for RenderMan, the Opterons were indeed almost twice as fast, where the Xeons were only about 50% faster.

Our other big rendering application was Shake, and it also allowed the use of two processors with one license.


2.) You mentioned that Opteron was more efficient than Xeons. I just had to ask: Was the particular software you were using particularly tuned to Opteron (i.e. 64-bit?) or was the 32-bit side of it just pleasant to work with? Any more insight you can share with me about the use of Opteron would be most helpful.

Yes and no. The Opterons are the first AMD machines to implement the SSE2 instructions, which are heavily used by RenderMan. Also, the HyperChannel communication between processors on the Opteron is light-years beyond the communication between Athlons and Xeons. On the other hand, there is absolutely no advantage in the 64-bitness of the Opterons -- we were running a 32-bit Linux (RedHat 9), and we weren't using more than 4 GB memory on any of the boxes.

3.) Did you guys end up buying a bunch of machines from a place like IBM or something, or was it more like "we bought the components and assembled ourselves..?" If it's the former, how'd you like the service?

We hired a beige-box manufacturer. We specced it out to various places, and PC Mall built them for the best price. If I had to do it over again, I'm not sure that I wouldn't go with IBM -- while they cost a lot more, I expect that they'd build more solid systems.

4.) Any regrets or things you'd do differently next time around?

We bought minitower machines instead of the more trendy, space- and power-efficient 1U or blade machines. We did that so that we could potentially use the new Gelato renderer from NVidia -- that software uses the current NVidia high-performance graphics cards as an external array processor, giving significantly better render performance.

As we didn't end up using Gelato, that was perhaps a mistake. We ended up power and HVAC constrained in the end -- as happens with almost every renderfarm I've heard of.

5.) Why are you getting rid of the machines used for Riddick? Or did I read that wrong?

No, you read it right. Hammerhead is a small company, typically working on just one show at a time. We don't see a use for the machines for another nine months or so, as we begin development of the next project -- and it just isn't right to leave all that compute horespower idle.

Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions

Re:Our experiences

[Thagg]

Are you able to tell us which productions were these machines involved in rendering?

These particular machines were just used for The Chronicles of Riddick. Computer technology advances so fast, has lowered in price so quickly, and movie post-production schedules are so long (six to nine months, typically) that we typically don't use any particular machines for more than a couple of films.

Also, in the interest of understanding how much it costs to set up a significant render farm, how much does this sort of thing cost? Is it all in the PCs, or would the backplane infrastructure cost surprise us a lot?

In fact the dominant cost, at least for us, is not the render boxes themselves. The network is a significant expense, as is the data server system. An even larger expense, though, are the licenses for the rendering software. Top-of-the-line rendering systems like RenderMan (for 3D) and Shake (for 2D) cost thousands of dollars per node. And then there are significant infrastructure costs in just electrical wiring and cooling.

At least in the 10-to-50 server range, I would say that the costs are pretty linear. As you get bigger than that, you can start to see some economies of scale.

At some point, it becomes profitable to start developing in-house software tools instead of buying licenses. Digital Domain's Nuke system was originally developed as a renderer for Flame, for example, so that the expensive Flame machines could be used for the interactive work and the batch rendering could happen on commodity hardware. For Riddick, we developed our own smoke-rendering system rather than use RenderMan, to free up render licenses for other parts of the movie.

I'm afraid that an explict cost-per-node breakdown would get into details that we keep confidential, but this should give you an overview of our situation.

Thad Beier
Hammerhead Productions

p.s we don't do Videos, we make Films.

Re:Our experiences

[dcmeserve]

An even larger expense, though, are the licenses for the rendering software.

What did you think of the freeware options, e.g. Aqsis?

Go with the G5's - your work is the important item

[Selecter]

Personally I'd go with the G5 Xserve with a few diskless cluster nodes tossed in.

Thats only if you desire maximum ease of use with minimum setup and running hassles. The same ease of use the regular G5's have is built into all their server stuff too. I'm sure the linux dudes will have something to say about that.....

I would take a really hard look at the ready made bio-information cluster they have all setup, and just load yer software as needed and off you go. But that's me. Some people seem to like futzing with computers.....After 20+ years doing that at work, I just wanna do what I wanna do when I wanna do it. Apple makes that easy.

I get paid to deal with headaches, I'm not gonna deal with them at home too.

Oops.

[Mr. Bad Example]

My subconscious desire to get out of the computer field as a career must be surfacing--I read this as "reindeer farm". Then reality set back in and I almost made a lame "LapLANder" joke before tasering myself.

XGRID

[artlu]

Recently, I have been working a lot with Apple's xgrid. We have been linking about 4 G5s/G4s together and getting impressive results. I don't understand your hardware situation, but if you are a Mac guy try it out.

GroupShares.com

pvm is the way

[Goeland86]

I think that what you're looking for is a renderfarm for computer graphics rendering, right? in that case, you should be looking at PVM or OpenMOSIX or even MPI. In either case, since you're going to have more data crunching than actual data transfer, I think that even T100 would be enough. gigabit will be nice, but fiber is not worth it. Drqueue is nice... if you can get it to work, and I didn't. We used pvmpovray for many things, and I think that might be worth a look. pvmpovray exists for gentoo with an ebuild script, which would make the installation and configuration the minimum pain for it. But that option requires a conversion from maya to povray files. Also, I don't know what the pricing is going to be like, but if it were up to me, I'd take the Opterons, because I believe they are faster, although I'm not positive on that, and because I know they're well supported under linux, and again, I think that's a more personal choice to make, but the impression I got from AMD is that you always get the most for your buck. The Opterons also let you find replacement parts or upgrades a little easier than the G5 if you burn a CPU or motherboard. That's just my $.02 worth of advice.

Re:Why run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you run Linux on the Apple boxes?

Because of its unnecessary flashiness? OS X is notoriously bloated. For the command line junkies among us, Linux fits the bill.

Light us up

[Reckless Visionary]

I'm hoping the Slashdot community might light us up a little here.

Light us up the bomb!

I had a related question

[RelliK]

... but it was rejected. How do you deal with terabytes of data (50+ TB), all in a single directory tree, all must be accessible to every node? This is larger than what you can store on a single filer. Also, for performance reasons, the data must be separated across multiple filers. Currently we use lots of symlinks to tie it all together into a single logical directory tree, but that's a really ugly solution. There's got to be a better way. Right? Anyone?

Re:I had a related question

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look at Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System. You can have your 50+ Terabytes on a SAN fabric, and each server on the fabric can have the 50+ terabyte LUN mapped to them. The Cluster File System manages all of the concurrent access to the filesystem from each node so things don't get clobbered.

You'll get your performance through the SAN by utilizing high performance FCAL disks and multiple HBAs to your servers. You can have the load balanced across the HBAs to give you the bandwidth that you require.

Sun Grid Engine, at least for Maya

[FueledByRamen]

I don't know what the setup for After Effects and such looks like, but I managed to build a pretty good Sun Grid Engine system for distributing Maya batch renders. SGE is free, works on Linux or Solaris, x86 or SPARC (I obviously used the x86 linux binaries), and seems to be very well designed. I set up a pretty solid system for netbooting the clients, running them diskless (or with local swap drives), adding new clients on the fly (all scripted), and it all worked flawlessly. You could submit a batch job and it would distribute it per-frame as an array job to all the different nodes. Or you could just run SETI on all of them...

It's since been taken down in favor of running Alfred (because I no longer use Maya's builtin renderer, we've moved on to MTOR and PRMan), but I still have all of the files and scripts for it. If anyone's interested, I'd be happy to share: sabretooth@gmail.com

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.

Render managers

[tikoloshe]

We have a 50 node dual 3Ghz render farm, 20 on w2k and 30 on linux 2.4.20 (ok Redhat9) We are currently using Muster www.vvertex.com, but are not that happy with it. It was reasonably priced, and the developers are very helpful, but its not quite there yet. I have been seriously considering building my own using a SQL database (currently Postgresql, but may swich to MySql) and perl. A render manager is really just a database with a bit of network sockets and scripts to run occasionally. A simple concept that is probably going to come back and bite me :)

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.

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.

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.)

Darwin

[Dav3K]

But more to the parent's point, OSX could be run Darwin-only, AKA BSD-style command-line interface. The bloat can be stripped out of OSX just as easily as it can for linux. Additionally, the user would have the comfort in knowing that his render farm is using the same OS as the workstations used to control it.

As other respondants have suggested, I guess it would come down to which OS supported the entire collection of desired applications for the job.

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.

Re:Small cluster

[Welsh Dwarf]

This is something I posted on an earlier discussion. The fact of the matter is that once you've got to a certain level in a subject, you forget what it's like to be starting out, or even that you 'started out', and hence loose all consideration for people new to your field.

Not a dig, just a remark on human nature

Advice gleaned from years of bitter experience

[gorodish]

Having built two generations of renderfarms, and now working on a third, I'd suggest building it as cheap as possible. You will want to upgrade every 2 years or so, so make sure that you won't feel bad disposing of the old farm when it's time for the new.

Regarding networking: you have to look carefully at the way the farm will be used. If you are doing any kind of compositing (which requires high I/O rates), you'll benefit from gigabit ethernet. You'll also benefit from gigabit if you have exceptionally short render times (less than 30 minutes per frame), since in this case I/O is a significant fraction of each frame's render cycle. But the longer your per-frame render time, the less necessary gigabit is. We've always used 100base and it still serves us well. Fiber is expensive and provides nothing you'll need that copper can't provide.

The individual machines should have identical configurations and be interchangable. Your goal is to not care when an individual machine dies. In light of this, there should be no local storage of data. You can save money on support if you buy spares instead of service contracts. Warranties also work, but the big manufacturers give their worst service to warranty-only customers.

Don't wire anything but ethernet to the machines. KVM wiring is expensive and unnecessary. Each machine should run unattended until it dies; when it does, you can wheel over a monitor and keyboard to diagnose it.

Opterons are fast, compatible, cool, lower-power and cheap. Xserves are nice, but we've found that Darwin doesn't integrate well into a pure Unix environment. You'd also be locking yourself into a single manufacturer.

Linux is cheap and effective, and easier to configure correctly as a server OS than as a desktop OS. There is so much commercial software available for it now that there is little reason to consider Windows or a commercial Unix. We haven't found Linux support from the big manufacturers to be all that great; if you use Linux, assume that you will have to solve most problems on your own.