Render Farm

[Peter Milner]

We are seriously looking into purchasing a rack of render nodes (minimum of 48 cores).

Would I need the render farm software to run a render on the nodes and if so, how would I set it up?

[Peter Milner]

Once a render job has been sent to the farm, can I then close that session of nXt and AutoCAD down?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Yes.

[George Ioannidis]

What was the cost of that rendering rack Peter? Was it four or five digit number? Thanks.

[Peter Milner]

£12.500.

We had about 1,300 hours of rendering to do on my machine for our latest brochure and to send it out to a commercial render farm would have cost £4,500 minimum. We also have another brochure coming out later in the year which would be another £4,500. So we made a commercial decision to buy our own system which should save money in the long run.

[Peter Milner]

Would it be possible to see the rendering progress on the farm monitor?

Either number of passes or a percentage would be useful.

At the moment, all I can see is when tasks are complete.

[Peter Milner]

Having said that, it does all seem to be working correctly.

Would either of these be of any use to you Roy?

http://cgru.info/home

http://opensource.mikrosimage.eu/puli.html

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

There are a bunch of queue management solutions out there-- we don't yet have enough critical mass to either interest the writers of that software in adopting us, or having me spend the time to make nXt work with them. 

I am working pretty heavily in this area in the context of nXt Studio (and cloud-based rendering), though.  That product is set up to work by time-- so it's much easier to gauge progress.  I'll look into updating the current render farm for progress, but it's not trivial.

[Peter Milner]

Is it possible to run the render farmer as a process so that it loads automatically when the node is switched on?

We've set one of the nodes up to work like this, but when you turn it off, it still appears in the farm monitor as being active.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'll check, but it should eventually stop being called "active" if it ceases to report back (I think-- haven't looked at this in a while.). I'm pretty sure the farmers report back periodically when idle.  If you could shut the thing down before powering down that should week too (again, guessing here.)

[Peter Milner]

In the Render Farm Monitor I can remove all previous jobs apart from the most recent one.

Any reason why?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

That one's been on the list forever.  I've never been able to figure it out.  In fairness, I haven't spent very much time on it since it's never risen beyond the level of nuisance.  It may be fixable.  Has something to do with Windows locking the folder-- a mechanism that I do rely upon heavily for the function of the farm.  Still not sure why the lock is not released.

[Peter Milner]

We would like to connect the computers in our London office to the renderfarm.

 I can connect to the farm using an IP address but they're not on the same local network.

How exeactly does the Farm Monitor link up with the Farmers?