Render Farm

[g_freckleton]

Lookin for any thoughts/ bit of advice here....

Im looking to build a render farm for use with 3D Studio / 3D Viz etc. I am led to believe that 8X1GHz processors run with Backburner or similar is a good deal faster than 4x2GHz in this type of system.

So i am looking to get together maybe 8 MoBos with 1GHz processors, 512 RAM (the workstation which manages the job needs a decent amount of RAM, say 2gig to start with), small hard drives (say 10gig, smallest i can get hold of, as they will only run a very limited OS and one program-the 3DViz, and will store no files locally) and network card. obviously with power and heat management.

My questions are:

any compatibility issues? should i try and get eight identical systems to make my life easier, i was thinking of picking up whatever i could get my hands on for next to no outlay.

is there a way of centralising the power supply/ cooling in one big rack/ with one big fat power cable instead of eight smaller ones, again just to make my life easier?

would welcome any thoughts people :?

 

[FITCamaro]

You just want to render stuff with 3D Studio Max?

Why not just get like a dual slot motherboard with 2 dual core Opterons, 8GB of RAM, a really nice Quadro or FireGL graphics card, and a bunch of fast hard drive space. In college my boss at school did rendering and did it on a 2.8GHz Non-HT P4 with a gig of ram, 160GB hard drive, and a 5700 Ultra. Took a little while but got the job done.

Or are you looking for something ultra professional? Basically though RAM, multiple CPU cores, and fast hard drives are key.

 

[johngoodwin]

g_freckleton,

If you just want to save money, you could consider going onto ebay, and looking at the bulk lots for some old dell PCs, and build your own enclosure to house the batch of them.

If you are looking at administration, I HIGHLY recommend you get the same configuration on each.

3 options that I can easily think of for ease of administration:
1) Live CD (basically bootable CD with usable OS)
2) Compact Flash to PATA adapter, and boot off it. (just be sure the OS doesn't write too much to the drive)
3) Network boot capable NIC (onboard might have it too), and study PXE or similar.

Also, you could make the Compact flash or live CD mount a network share for the app you need.

It's possible, if you wanted to calculate the power usage, you could wire your own high end power supply up to power 4 or more units, especially, if they have no hard drive, or PCI cards.

I hope this helps,

John

 

[linux_0]

You just want to render stuff with 3D Studio Max?

Why not just get like a dual slot motherboard with 2 dual core Opterons, 8GB of RAM, a really nice Quadro or FireGL graphics card, and a bunch of fast hard drive space. In college my boss at school did rendering and did it on a 2.8GHz Non-HT P4 with a gig of ram, 160GB hard drive, and a 5700 Ultra. Took a little while but got the job done.

Or are you looking for something ultra professional? Basically though RAM, multiple CPU cores, and fast hard drives are key.

I agree a Dual Opteron would be perfect for this! :-D

 

[borandi]

Aye, dual dual core opterons or quad dual core opterons would work wonders for ya Check Tyan's mobos for quad/octo opty systems.

Then you'd only need a couple raid 0 raptors or some 15.4k SCSIs, and some RAM.

 

[linux_0]

http://tyan.com/products/html/opteron.html


The S2895 and S4885 are particularly well suited for this.

 

[HideOut]

Many motherboards can be had via OEM/refurb/older designs or somethign pretty resonably too. Check eBay (excelent feedback on something like this) Neweggs refurbs or silimar stuff.

Hide

 

[AloeDesign]

there would be no reason to have raid or fast HD's to render in studiomax.. try posting your question on a dedicated 3D board and see if you get a better response.

 

[ivoryjohn]

Dual/Quad or any Multi Processor configuration is not the same as a render farm which sets up a different kind of multi processor system.

To the original poster, I don't see how using a single power supply will make your life easier if you have to fashion it yourself. Naturally, if money were no object, a blade system would work wonders for you.

If your goal it to pick up some inexpensive 1ghz computers to build your farm, then I suggest you calculate the how much power they consume, and how much heat they create. I wonder if you could find 8 older 1 ghz laptops for your farm. Of course, you wouldn't be building your own PSU, but they should be quiet and cooler than a bunch of older desktop computers.

 

[FITCamaro]

Then you'd only need a couple raid 0 raptors or some 15.4k SCSIs, and some RAM.

You don't need Raptors for rendering.

RAID 0 isn't really needed either and I'd almost discourage it because then you run the risk of loosing all your data.

Depending on how much rendering you're going to be doing I'd recommend just doing RAID 5 to create a nice big array with redundancy.

If all you're trying to do though is render some simple scenes or graphics you don't even need that. A 7200rpm 250GB hard drive would be enough with a dual core CPU and 2GB of RAM.

 

[borandi]

Ah well, I'm just a performance whore =P

 

[unstable]

RAID 0 isn't really needed either and I'd almost discourage it because then you run the risk of loosing all your data.

yes if he's doing the rendering locally...but correct me if I'm wrong--If he's offloading the rendering task to a cluster or farm...he'd still have the original drawings--if the disks on the cluster crashed he'd only lose the rendering work.

2) Compact Flash to PATA adapter, and boot off it. (just be sure the OS doesn't write too much to the drive)

this can be a big issue if you're not careful. If for example, you were to load Windows onto Compact Flash...the thing would be hosed in a matter of minutes (swap file / page file).

 

[johngoodwin]

Quote:

2) Compact Flash to PATA adapter, and boot off it. (just be sure the OS doesn't write too much to the drive)


this can be a big issue if you're not careful. If for example, you were to load Windows onto Compact Flash...the thing would be hosed in a matter of minutes (swap file / page file).

It's amazing you bothered to quote me, then restate what I already said.

John

 

[unstable]

Quote:

2) Compact Flash to PATA adapter, and boot off it. (just be sure the OS doesn't write too much to the drive)


this can be a big issue if you're not careful. If for example, you were to load Windows onto Compact Flash...the thing would be hosed in a matter of minutes (swap file / page file).

It's amazing you bothered to quote me, then restate what I already said.

John

It's amazing that you're so on-edge that you felt I was taking some kind of shot at you. I was just providing additional details on the fact that compact flash will not live long with numerous reads/writes. In the case of Windows, I'd be surprised if you made the mistake of installing onto compact flash--if the CF would survive the first boot. Unlike *Nix you don't have the option of specifying where you want the swap space.

lighten up.

 

[johngoodwin]

In the case of Windows, I'd be surprised if you made the mistake of installing onto compact flash--if the CF would survive the first boot.

Actually, Windows can be installed on CF, you just need to use Live CD type ideas, like the Bart PE project.

Enjoy,

John

 

[linux_0]

In the case of Windows, I'd be surprised if you made the mistake of installing onto compact flash--if the CF would survive the first boot.

Actually, Windows can be installed on CF, you just need to use Live CD type ideas, like the Bart PE project.

Enjoy,

John


Even better idea run Linux and use blender :-D

 

[ProdigyMS]

What kind of budget are you looking at per PC or for the whole farm together?

 

[dcdc]

A low cost, low power option I'd recommend is Celeron 1GHz processors (tualatin core- not coppermine). These run at 100MHz by default can be overclocked to 1.333GHz and 133MHz FSB without any fuss. I've got one here that runs with just the PSU blowing over it's heatsink and it runs at around 28ºC under load (they're somewhere in the region of 23 Watts). Don't be put off by the celeron label either - they're basically a low power version of the coppermine P3 - i.e. 256KB L2 cache, but with the FSB dropped to 100MHz.

an opteron setup would be quicker and probably use less power, but there's the extra setup expense.

If you want to run from compactflash you can do it fairly easily in XP using the Enhanced Write Filter (EWF) from windows embedded. Not sure about Linux options...

---------------
Donate your unused CPU cycles to medical research: http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta

 

[FLA94FD]

8 1Ghz would be faster mainly because a 2 Ghz processor is not twice as fast. In the setup you have described hard drive speed and graphics card are only an issue the primary rendering machine.

My only question is if you have money for all the max stuff why not just get a blade serve?

Also I would take this question over to one of the max forums. Most of the people who post here are not talking from experince but rather repeating something they read somewhere. :roll:

 

[g_freckleton]

thanks for your help guys, that gives me some thoughts to chew on

 

[Binximus]

Get an IBM Bladecentre and you got 1 whole centralised unit of like up to 15 servers and you can get them cheapish....sorta check out this site www.itxchange.com