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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."
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... 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.
OR - if you get a real job, at a real company, they'll give you their unwanted outdated computers for FREE.
Seriously! Build a massive render farm out thousands of 286's!
"everything from top to bottom roll-your-own to buying things pre-built" Is there some way to get high off computers now? I tried smoking all that junk that fell in my keyboard but it just smelt like burnt hair.
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I hear non-factory farming also produces denser images that are more pleasing to the eye and have a higher contrast value. Besides, you'd be helping out the small rendering businesses by only selecting local renders.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
If you run your render farm on PowerPC's you can put their eieio instruction to good use!!!!!
The article touches on general bits of info that might have been time consuming to find. I live in a small town where commercials for clients like the local chamber of commerce are often put together in iMovie, and delivered in a rush. Recently I was approached by a local art director and was asked about moving from 3D stills (which I do occasionally) to 3D animation to be composited into commercial work (probably for bigger clients than the chamber...). I've determined that I can afford about 2-3 minutes of render time per frame before deadlines really start to get pushed out. So rendering infrastructure is very important.
/. renderfarm pretty soon, and I'll be sending my receipts to CmdrTaco.
My studio is unique in that I work with open source software, Blender, Lux, etc. And my clients dig it because many of them are into sustainability and see my philosophy as being similar to theirs. I've looked at outsourcing the animation projects to commercial renderfarms, but when you start to "Better Know a Linux Network," you move beyond "get it done" and start to take interest in your own little LAN. Next to my video compositing and 3D graphics books I have a big ol' fat Pro Linux System Administration book, and it's handy, and I like it that way.
The article points out that I can save $140 per node by not needing to buy Windows XP Pro 64 bit edition. This is actually great for me since I typically use the money I save on software to buy more hardware.
BTW, what's up with Slashdot javascript? I'm going to have to build a freaking
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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.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
I really loved the system they have set up at ACCAD at Ohio State. They had some clustering software running on all of the workstations that could take it over when it wasn't in use. So you had a very nice computer lab and a render farm all rolled into one. And as a user you could set how much you wanted to share while you were working - so if you were just web browsing, the second core could be churning away on someone's render, but if you were using Maya yourself you could have it all to yourself.
I really wish I remember what the software was, and I'm sure this is a common arrangement at these sorts of facilities, but I remember being impressed at the execution of it.
This is where I got off. I wasn't aware that dual core processors treated ram separately. Thats news to me, and the guys at AMD, Intel, MS, and Linus as well. Every OS I'm aware of bases the memory available on the app, not the core, with most 32 bit OSes allowing for about 3G of memory usable to the app (roughly a gig is part of the kernel space for various things in most cases), and allowing for more with some kernel tuning depending on the OS. I think Linux allows for that, I know Windows and FreeBSD do.
I also guess he's never heard of PAE? Last I checked pretty much every modern processor and OS was capable of supporting 36 bit addressing, meaning a process is more than capable of addressing vastly larger amounts of RAM if its designed to do so, and even without support directly in the application, you can run multiple processes to get the 3G or so per process, which with 2 processes you are at 6. So if your shitting rendering app is 32 bit, not PAE aware, single threaded and you have more than 1 core than you can just pile on more processes with any modern OS and exceed 4G of usage. With a real rendering app, i.e. multithreaded, PAE aware and still 32 bit, its a no brainer. Of course if you're going through the effort to do all this, what are the chances your renderer is going to be 32 bit instead of 64? This is a question I really do not know as I'm not a render monkey, but I just can't see anything that matters still being a 32 bit app unless RAM really doesn't matter in rendering, which lets face it, for a complex scene, it does.
Its good to know Tom's has some real techs working for him that understand how computers work.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
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PS2s are cheap now, and I know they've had linux running on them for some time. Has anyone managed to get something like ClusterKnoppix running on PS2 hardware? A renderfarm of slim PS2s sitting on a bookshelf would be kind of neat looking.
It's called a botnet.
TYVM.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I did this two years ago with four cheap Dell Inspirons ($299 each, with free shipping). They're thin, easy to stack, and consume less power combined than my desktop. No discrete graphics, smallest possible HDD; all they need is processors (dual-core) and RAM. I run a stripped-down Ubuntu on them, and use some Python scripts to distribute Blender render jobs to them over the network, assembling the final frames on a file server.
Separate machines make an enormous difference. Even though rendering is relatively amenable to parallelization, a quad core machine isn't nearly as fast as two dual-core machines with the same specs. Even today, you would have to spend an awful lot of money to get a single machine that renders animations as fast as my two-year-old cluster of four.
I could even have built my own machines, and saved a few tens of dollars per machine, but the price was already pretty reasonable.
If I was to guess, non-linear probably refers to GI calculations. Global Illumination does take some time pre-calculate and a lot of things in those calculations are relative to the timeline so getting those pre-calculations done on a network so that the rest of the nodes can get access to it in a non-linear method does make a lot of sense. this goes fro particle and point caching too.
Also, if there's one thing that I've learned is that as hardware gets better, the demand gets higher. I can render stuff that I made five years ago that took days at the time in a minute but the scene is terribly dated and now I have scenes that look great but still take days to render, so I feel rather confident that in ten years, scenes will still take forever to render but they'll have hyper-atomic precision or some other crap to them.
It's a classic open source strategy. He's letting the nerds have free sex, then charging for support. I mean, eventually the nerd will want to know where the clitoris is, right?
Didn't read, don't give a fuck.
Building your own cluster can be done by any retard.
I've been looking into building one for myself, mainly for Blender and LuxRender.
Now, if there were CUDA/OpenCL versions for the above programs, the Zotac atom/nvidia-ion boards might be nice, expensive, but nice and low powered (or add PCI geforce 9500's, which would also work with my following idea (why the fuck won't they put a PCI-E/16 on these boards?))...
I've been looking into mini-itx mobos (off of Newegg, that mainly shows me zotac geforce 7 series),
and intel Wolfdale procs that the reviews say overclock to al least around 3.5G...
Add 4G of ram (or whatever the board will take), a gigabit switch, set up PXE or a command line only linux distro off of flash,,,
DING!!! FRIES ARE DOEN!!!
Building your own render farm is easy and cheap if you have half a clue as to what you're doing.
Oh,,, knowing where your circuit breakers are when setting it up will help too.