Build Your Own Render Farm

Another installment of Tom's Hardware's how-to articles has a look at what it might take to build your own render farm. The article looks at everything from top-to-bottom roll-your-owns to buying things pre-built and the pricing insanity that goes along with it. "If you are working as a freelance artist in the above-mentioned media, toying with the idea, or doing so as a hobbyist, then building even a small farm will greatly increase your productivity compared to working on a single workstation. Studios can even use this piece as a reference for building new render farms, as we're going to address scaling, power, and cooling issues. If you're looking at buying a new machine and are thinking of spending big bucks to get a bleeding-edge system, you might want to step back and consider whether it would be more effective to buy the latest and greatest workstation or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes."

Comments

Unlatest

[fm6]

... or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes.

Especially if you buy used systems. Computer hardware depreciates fast.

Re:Unlatest

[mr_exit]

the bandwidth to Amazon would kill you. It's not uncommon for one frame to pull in gigabytes of textures and geometry needed for the render. Rendering CG is very disk, memory and CPU intensive.

Cloud computing

[Anonymous Coward]

If your time has value, then buying CPU time from Sun, Amazon, or even Microsoft might be cheaper.

render nodes

[Tom]

Even a single render node dramatically increases productivity for me.

I'm doing TG2 skybox renders, something that easily takes 12 hours each, and often two, three, four times that. Having a few render nodes (two at the moment) means I can continue working while a few frames are already rendering. That means more of my time is spent productive and less is spent waiting.

My render nodes aren't even dedicated machines, just other machines I have around that are mostly idle.

Re:The need is fading

[hardburn]

Is this astroturfing? Their website implies that they can streamline frame rendering down by several orders of magnitude, but there's no indication about how. Their FAQ is content-free, using buzzword-laden statements like " . . . gives non-linear access to lighting, ambient occlusion, materials . . . ." What is "non-linear" supposed to mean here?

There's always going to be a place for a render farm. Even if 3D modelers tomorrow can work in real time with settings that would take hours to render today, that'll just mean that the render farm will be running with even higher settings that might not exist today. At some point, we'll be able to run a render farm doing ray tracing with hundreds of reflections and get realistic skin pores and wood grain out of the technique, but the modeler is only going to be working with 20 or so.

A classic quote

[somenickname]

A total of 10 copies of XP (for 10 nodes) may sound like a big expense, but it actually adds $140 per unit, pushing the cost of these machines to about $485 per unit for a dual-core node or $610 per unit for a quad-core configuration.

I think Tom should have rephrased that to put it into perspective: "Don't worry only 20% of the node cost is from Windows". I find it amazing that the most expensive component on the cheaper node is Windows XP and on the beefier node, it's nearly the same price as the CPU. It's even more baffling that this statement appears on the same page in reference to CPU selection:

It's really all about how much you want to spend here, because this is the single most expensive component required for each node.

Maybe Tom is a secret Linux fan and is hinting that Windows isn't a component but a tax. Or maybe he's just really bad at math.

Re:A classic quote

[BitZtream]

Windows is certainly overpriced, no argument there.

I would argue however that the OS is probably the single largest and most important component of the PC. While its not a piece of hardware, and it is just one of many required components, its the one that matters the most, I think.

I mean, change your ram manufacture, you probably won't notice. Mobo, processor, case, power supply, all these things can change a fair amount and in most cases won't provide an immediately noticeable difference. The software running on them for the most part won't care.

Change the OS and the world just changed. All of your other software needs to be changed in most cases, save for FreeBSD emulating Linux or Wine letting you run Windows binaries, which you're probably not going to want if you're trying to render frames as fast as possible.

Either way, unless your software requires Windows, I can't imagine why you wouldn't use a free OS for your rendering farm. Its something you shouldn't really directly interact with after it is setup. Even if you prefer Windows the desktop/workstation (I do personally) I can't imagine why would would waste the money on licenses when you're probably going to get far superior performance out of something like a cut down, bare bones Linux or FreeBSD install.

Truth be told, the guy writing the article really isn't all that knowledgeable, as you can tell by his take on how much memory you should use and its limitations mentioned in my other post.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1306469&cid=28734027

Re:A classic quote

[im_thatoneguy]

Windows is just the start. If you really want to use your renderfarm you're going to want some rendermanagement software to keep it all running.

Cost per node of Deadline (which I highly recommend) is $140 per computer. Then of course you've already bought a copy of Maya or Max etc. $3k. You might want to use an alternate renderer than Mental Ray. $1k per workstation. And you're going to want ghost for equivalent to keep all your computers up to date and get them back to work in the event of a crash.

Also you're going to need a file server. If you have more than 10 computers that means Windows Server and CAL licenses. It's going to need to be a pretty beefy machine to feed GBs of data to the render nodes so expect at least $3k. If you lose all your data this will all be for nothing so you'll want to also be sure you invest in some good backup software. Also probably want to consider archiving all your old work on tape so I would factor in an LTO drive.

When you factor in the costs of actualing running a render farm the cost of windows is pretty negligible.

Re:How to Jump Your Own Shark!

[Hurricane78]

Well, if you of all people state that, then it must be true, mustn't it, managing editor *with a huge interest in the site not looking bad* "Chris". ;)

But let's just say, after all the problems with your tests, I can not trust you any more. If you want to re-gain that trust, try to make your testing methods really clear, and do not fall for so many beginners errors and strange things, that the first person in the comments can point out in about five minutes. ^^
I recommend getting some feedback from external people, before you put an article out there. That way you can fix these issues in-place.
(Oh, and better have comments pointing out errors, than having no comments at all. Everyone with a bit of web experience will avoid sites without comments, for obvious trust issues.)