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?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Depends how it's configured.  Each machine in the rack would require 64 bit Windows with runtimes and .net.  They would all require access to a shared directory and need to be individually accessible by machine name.  It should work at that point, I think.

It's also possible to make this stuff work with someone else's scheduler, which might provide a more robust solution ( although likely not without some work at my end.)

[Peter Milner]

Thanks Roy. I'll let you know if and when we progress with this.

[Peter Milner]

Would the render nodes need to be running windows, or could they be Linux based?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Windows.  They'd also need to be properly configured with .net and runtimes.

[Peter Milner]

When using the Render Farm software, is data transferred in small lumps or is there a constant stream of data?

We need to know whether our network connection will get bogged down or not.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

More like large lumps.  When each node begins a task, it loads the data file in the shared folder.  Once the file is loaded that's pretty much it for input traffic.  An output file is created in the shared folder on task completion.  The amount of network traffic occurring during a task is minimal.

If you're using the Path Tracer or Hybrid engines with identical nodes,  you can set the thing up so that the number of tasks exactly match the available nodes.  In that case you should only get traffic at startup and completion of the entire job.

[Peter Milner]

It looks like we're definitely going down this route with 8 dual processors (between 48 and 80 cores).

I need to be 100% sure this is going to work as we are spending a lot of money on the hardware.

Could I send the render node specification to someone to look at and confirm that it will work?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Not really.  Anything with windows and .net should work, but this is new territory for us as well and may require some software updates.  If any individual node exceeds 32 cores there may be issues getting them all fed-- although I expect the hybrid engine will still do ok.  No problem if each node is smaller.  Identical nodes will be better.

[Peter Milner]

We've gone for 8 x 10 core running at 2.5GHz (4 nodes, each with dual 10 core processors).

Any particular version of .net?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

The r19 versions 2013, 14, and 15 use .net 4.0.  Previous versions use 2.0.

[Peter Milner]

Well, here it is: 4 nodes, 80 cores, 160 threads.

Time for some testing.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Fun.  Let me know how it goes-- I should be able to turn around updates pretty quick if needed.