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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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My work here is dung.
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.
My grandparents rendered on their small farm, but unfortunately I hate lye soap.
Free Martian Whores!
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
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
It's called a botnet.
TYVM.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.