Farm Questions

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Hi Roy

Quick questions about render farm and computers.

1. How does the render farm divide up the workload to the active nodes.

Equally dividing tasks regardless of the computers processing power or does it balance the tasks. Will a weak processing computer create a bottle neck or is more nodes better?

2. If I look at a computer that is rendering as a active node and the CPU is running at 100% say and the ram usage is around 1gb is that the optimal. The system currently has 2gb of ram, will installing more ram produce greater performance? Or is there a limit to what the CPU can handle. Tested by adding ram to 6gb and the ram usage only went up to 1.5gb.

What Ram amount will work best is the real question?

win7-64bit - i5 intel process with 2 gb ram. (running render farm)

(Using window task manager to monitor usage)

Ian

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The farm isn't particularly sophisticated in how it divides the workload.  If I remember correctly, the number of cores are taken into account when it splits a single frame, non Path-Tracer task.  That may be it in terms of trying to load balance among different machines.  Yes, a slow machine on the farm can cause a bottleneck.  There is no answer to the RAM question-- it depends how big your models are.  Because the farm runs without AutoCAD it generally uses a lot less RAM for a rendering task than running nXt in AutoCAD.  For Win7-64 the physical RAM limitations are 192GB for the professional editions and 8-16GB for the home editions.  There may be other constraints imposed by the hardware.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Have just tried to single image render sequence output from a render farm as per the format below.

Loads the first image but when do the Arithmetic add nothing happens. Have tried reloading and build 271 and 302. What I'm I doing wrong?

Followed this...............

After the job is complete, output can be found in the job's Output folder. To reconstruct the output into a single image use the following steps:

1. Open the nXt Image Editor.
2. Load the first image of the sequence, 000000.nXtImage
3. From the menu, select Image→Arithmetic→Add for the standard engine –OR– Image→Arithmetic→Combine Path Tracings… for the Path Tracing engine.
4. Select all of the other images in the sequence (do not select 000000.nXtImage again or it will be counted twice)

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Thanks for reply Roy.

Yes have found that one of my lesser computers is a bottlenect and dropped it and the render finished quicker. Also I will just add 6gb ram for my 3 nodes and see how it goes. (192GB sounds like perfection thou) Have 4 nodes and it's working for me, gets the animation done.

Still looking at the nxtimage sequence issue, not should what I'm doing wrong.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

No clue.  Try opening the other images in the sequence and make sure you can see them.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Ok will try that now.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

Opened each file in the sequence and it show a slice of the images.

No blanks. 00000-00026 are fine just not load together.

(Each file is around 3-4mb.)

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Try adding two of the slices together to see if that works.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

No will not add 2 files together.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Hmmm... Zip up two of the files and send them here.  Use the Upload link under support.

[Ian Foster Griffith]

UPload zip file with 2 nxtimage files.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

No problems here.  Loaded 00000.nXtImage and added 00001 to it. (Forum messed up the aspect ratio-- it's fine here.)

[Ian Foster Griffith]

So it's my editor that has the problem. Should reload.

What do you mean "Forum messed up the aspect ratio"