Render farm

[Peter Milner]

I've followed the instructions for setting up the render farm, but the farm monitor only shows my own machine. How do I get it to find the other machines with the farm installed?

All the machines are on the same LAN.

 

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Unlikely-- it's working fine here-- similar setup to yours with one 64bit node and one 32. It's much more likely that there's a write-access problem to the folder. Did you try the Notepad test above?

You've probably already done this, but when you restart the node you close it (right click on the tray icon) and run "Render Farmer" from the start menu.

[Eric B]

Would like to test just the act of setting up a render farm, keeping it simple with just two machines right now.
1) So that I can learn what is going on
2) Because it says you can link two machines for free

Never done it so here are some super simple questions:
a) Am I correct in reading that you need a workstation with AR5 running and the Farm but that the other machine needs only the Farm?
b) The common folder that both can write to, should it be on the LAN? or is it better that it be on the hard drive of one of the machines?
c) For say a single still image, between two computers... is the rendering simply cut in half? Are the relative speeds of either machine taken into account when the work is allocated? Seems potentially inefficient if you have machines of differing speeds.
d) And it sounds like you will need to stitch images together when everything is done for single images so not the best use for quick test renders of complex models or scene with involved materials - the now old advice that AR5 still is best on a single very fast machine than several somewhat fast machines appears to hold true.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

A lot of this is covered here.

nXt for AutoCAD (or another platform that supports the farm) is only needed to feed the farm a job. Farm jobs can be launched from anywhere-- they don't have to come from a participating machine. You will need to install the farm on your "feeder" machines and launch it in order to specify the shared folder. Once you do that, the farm can be shut down on these machines.

nXt does not care where the shared folder is, as long as a UNC or mapped path to it is possible. It may, of course, make a huge difference at your shop which of these you choose.

This is a very simple render farm without any sophisticated load balancing or centralized management. There are much fancier ones out there that probably could be made to work with this software (although, to the best of my knowledge, no one has attempted it yet-- it would take a bit of a pioneering spirit.) In general, this farm works best if the machines on the farm are similar in capability.

The simplest exercise would be to go to the Batch Processor and farm out two different views of the same drawing.

I don't think the two node limitation kicks in until 12/1-- so right now you can try the software on as many nodes as you like.

[pun1407]

Hi Roy,

I want to know that, I have a two license of nxt, so I have a nos. of farm is two or five?

thank you!

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The farm is a separate product-- it has nothing to do with your nXt license. The evaluation version will only allow 2 nodes beginning 12/1.

[pun1407]

roy, thank you very much!

[Eric B]

Ha! I had to laugh just a bit Roy when I followed your link above.

That is exactly the page I had just come from when I formed my basic questions.

After reading what you said above about five times I am still a bit confused as it reads almost the reverse to me as what I thought was needed to set things up... and I read it very slowly and thought about each step... one... at... a... time.

So, which machine needs to have nXt AR5 on it? It sounds like the feeder does not need AR5, I think... or must AR5 be on all the machines - which is what I thought...up until I went to the page link...

As far as the AR5 Batch Processor I have only used it one time so far. Also, from what I see here the act of setting up a batch to send two renders to two computers via the Farm is actually a great deal more involved (or convoluted in my mind) than just running a simple render on two different machines both with AR5.

That is exactly what I did back in the AR3 days with renders or animations - just manually broke the job down into segments and had each machine run a portion of the total job. Worked really well as there were no additional programs or coordination and if a machine crashed you still have most of the work.

I think I will mess with it when I have more time to spend.

[akinlolu olugboji]

The feeder or the farm needs to have Nxt installed that is where I believe the job is on. It also needs the farm installed on it, while the other guys or nodes need only the farm installed on them.

Tried a number of times but never more than on two machines at a time.

The days of AR3, when doing animations, I have to copy all corresponding files, maps, libraries, the model etc on each machine as I could never get the other computers to to pick the libraries off the network.