[CentOS] Rendering farm?

aurfalien at gmail.com aurfalien at gmail.com
Fri Oct 9 22:56:13 UTC 2009


Funny, I build/maintain em all the time.

U in VFX by chance?

What are you rendering, in what app?  If the app is only in Winblowz,  
hen thats the pain u will be in.

What are your artists, mainly VFX sup comfortable in, Winblowz or Linuz?

I like to ask the VFX sup what he/she wants first b4 proceeding.  If  
they dunno, pitch pros and cons of each.

If you got OSX in here, its easier to go Linux on the farm.

2D has very diff characteristics then 3D.

I saw that very same Toms article, it seemed to be written from an  
artists perspective.

These things can spiral out of control easily so first is first, is  
this for an immediate project or you want to amortize this over time?

If u b in VFX, Bell Computers rents render farms and will apply that  
rental 100% to purchasing it, a win win.  We currently have some 16  
core beasties from him now.  The only caveat is that your rental has  
to be consecutive in terms of time rented.

Don't cheap out on the switch if you can afford to amortize over a few  
years.  You will feel pain using Dell/Netgear switches if doing Mental  
Ray particle cache renders which I've sen 15GB per frame.

I've always liked Foundry/Extreme, unlike Cisco/Netgear, they are non  
blocking meaning they don't over subscribe there backbone.

The backbone of any farm is the file server, so be vert careful and  
find out what kind of bandwidth you need.

Ping me off line if you need, to me this is a huge conversation.





On Oct 9, 2009, at 3:40 PM, Scott Ehrlich wrote:

> I received at least one email suggesting a Windows-based rendering
> farm - likely to consist of a few rack systems all running 64-bit
> Windows.  I read an article on Tomshardware which gave some decent
> insight.   What can list participants offer on this concept?
>
> I don't care _how_ the resource is implemented - virtual machine,
> cluster, etc.  I just want to get the most resources for the money,
> and permit the users to get the results they need, when and how they
> need it.   If a desktop solution can be implemented in multiuser farm
> environment, that would be great.   Just provide links/resources to
> help me get better educated.  Who knows, maybe others on the list
> would benefit from the discussion and results, too.
>
> If it makes most sense to migrate the money from a single desktop to a
> transparently available farm that does the same job the desktop could
> have done, and considering the farm is expandable, then I'm all for
> it, as would be the money people!
>
> Insights and educated welcome!
>
> Scott
> _______________________________________________
> CentOS mailing list
> CentOS at centos.org
> http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos




More information about the CentOS mailing list