Amazon Ec2

[steven talbott]

I was just curious if anyone had any experience so far with the render farm running under EC2? I am looking at the possibility of stepping up to it for my rendering needs and just wanted to see what good and bad experiences others have had.

Thanks,
Steven

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

We tried it a while back.  Not sure if they've changed anything in the interim but back then we gave up pretty quickly.  The basic render farm we sell is file-system based-- that's how the different nodes communicate and how output is extracted.  This sort of scheme doesn't tend to run unmodified on a cloud.

[steven talbott]

I know there is the initial loading of the model and then the upload back to server for each slice complete, but other than that is there a lot more disk activity. Ec2 does allow for mounted blocks they keep local. My thought was to tell autocad to render to the farm that stores there, then have multiple instances on amazons local network render it. Am I missing something here or is that the way you tried it.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The queue management in nXt is very file-system dependent.  The servers run all the time as invisible processes-- they place an icon in the tray when running.  They periodically access a common folder and sub-folders, watching for certain types of files which cause them to latch onto a task.  File locking is used extensively to prevent servers from latching the same task.  I doubt if these mechanisms will work properly in ec2.  We didn't spend a lot of time on it, though.

[steven talbott]

ok so then best option would be find someplace to rent a pc for a day or two when demand spikes then?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

At the moment, perhaps.  I've got a working prototype cloud solution (works quite nicely actually.)  It's scheduled to go into beta testing soon, but I'm somewhat dependent on a 3rd party company for this so I can't completely control the timing.

[steven talbott]

If they charge a decent rate per hour like amazon I would be all over this in a heartbeat since my work tends to slam me at odd times and then is dead for a while. Please keep me up to date and let them know they have at least 1 customer ready for this. Thanks!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Will do.  This will likely work for path tracer and e4 engines only-- so you may need to experiment a bit with these.

The rate we've been using for testing is about $.30 / core-hr.  So, for example, a rendering which would take a 4 core machine 8 hrs. (32 core hrs.) could be processed for about $10.

[akinlolu olugboji]

Make it two customers. 

steven talbott said:

If they charge a decent rate per hour like amazon I would be all over this in a heartbeat since my work tends to slam me at odd times and then is dead for a while. Please keep me up to date and let them know they have at least 1 customer ready for this. Thanks!

[steven talbott]

do you happen to know what cpus they are using to compute those core hours?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Nope.