Render farm OS

[Peter Milner]

We've just added a couple of powerful servers onto our render farm, but they are only running steadily at 40% capacity.

Both machines are running on Windows 2012 Server. Would this make any difference?

They both have quad 10 core processors and all seem to be running.

In comparison, the dedicated render farm bounces up and down between 50% and 80% as it runs through a render (running on Windows 7 Pro).

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I've got a holiday weekend and one item to finish, then I can look at this. 

On first glance, it looks possible to do, but I don't have an r18 to test with.

In the meantime, when you get a chance, try just seeing if the farm nodes and monitor work and communicate with each other.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

BTW, the item I'm finishing up is cloud rendering-- which may interest you as a way of easily (and inexpensively) expanding your in-house farm when you need more rendering power.

[Peter Milner]

Okay, I'll give it a go. I presume it won't affect the nXtRender software.

Thanks for looking into it.

Just out of interest, how many processors will the cloud use?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Use a different shared folder for the ArStudio farm.  Otherwise, no-- nXtRender won't be affected by anything you do here.

There are (or will be shortly) two ways to do cloud computing. 

One is to get your own Azure Batch account. This has a few steps to it, but it's the cheapest option and you can get as many cores as Microsoft will allow you to get.  I have 128-- but I think you can ask for thousands.

The second way is to use my cloud-- located currently on Azure but wherever I want.  This option will limit you to 32 high speed cores, but it's very easy to do-- you just need a credit card.

We're looking into a third option which will also use one of our clouds but allow you to prepurchase tokens from Render Plus.

[Peter Milner]

I can't get ArFarmNode.exe to run on any of the machines. It just crashes.

Is there something else that needs installing or running?

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Did you install the entire Ar Studio package?

[Peter Milner]

All up and running now and I can see all the nodes in the farm monitor.

I can't test it yet as I'm running some nXt renders.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Great-- obviously no rush on this....  I'm a day or so away from being able to attempt creating a plugin for r18.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I've had a version of the ArStudio plugin which should run in AutoCAD 2011 for a little while now-- I'm working on an in-process version which should be ready in January.  I can't test the r18 version here-- I don't have anything that old.  Will you be available for testing.  It can be now or after the holidays.

[Peter Milner]

Yes, I'm happy to try it out anytime.

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

I'll put together something today or tomorrow for you.  I just need small test verifying that the product can load and run.  It won't be fully functional for another couple of weeks,

[Roy Hirshkowitz]

Sending a private msg.