Render farm??

[aaronwhite]

I am trying to convince the company I am working for to set up a small 'render farm', but I have no knowledge in this area. Can someone please give me advice on where to start.

Thanks

[PMG311]

rack mount is definitely the way to go, but as said before its is expensive. Try convincing the company to build 2 or 3 quad core desktop machines (we build them for just over $1000 each, and i can give you a parts list if needed) and show them the difference in render times between using a single machine and having a small render farm. Plus then you don't tie up a workstation and can take on more projects :bounce:

-Paul

[grantmoore3d]

Just some personal advice/things I've read about render farms for small businesses :

Other than setting up a bunch of computers to do the actual work... you should also preferably have a network storage drive that everyone can save work to when it is going to be rendered, it just makes setting up the farm that much easier. This doesn't have to be some expensive SAN unit, you can just do it with a normal computer with a few hard drives in a RAID configuration. The IT guy should know how to do this pretty easily.

On top of all that, you would probably want software to queue your renders. I've personally used one called Smedge and it's great. You set up a primary computer with the softare to be the master (the one running the show), then make any other computer you want to share rendering a client. And the clients can even be your workstation, since you have the option of running the render client manually. So, if you leave at the end of the day, you can turn on the client and help render with any/all workstations, and just close and reboot once you get back the next day.

Also, please understand, that even if you are a small company, you don't have to go and buy a whole bunch of servers (though they are nice since they take up less space and are fast). You can even build one on a small budget, just buying moderately good PCs and installing what you need on them can suffice. It's not necessarily how much processing power you have, as much as it can be the number of CPUs to spread out the work. (EG: 2 x 3 Ghz machines doesn't necessarily mean it will render the same speed as 6 x 1Ghz machines, and I've heard in some cases the later to be faster so long as the RAM is enough). But of course, more machines means a possibly larger electric bill... so there's always things to consider.

[aaronwhite]

Thanks guys, thats a huge help. I'm sure i'll be back with some more questions.

Unfortuneatley the IT guy is also an owner of the comapany and since he dosen't have too much to do with the production side this is a low priority, also I feel this is very unfamiliar territory for him.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.