Few questions regarding MAC/PC Clusters, compatibility

[cgbeige]

use Frantic Deadline. It is very good at cross-platform renderfarm things like this and works with pretty much anything you throw at it. It's also free for up to two slaves (unlimited CPUs on each slave). That way you won't have to screw around with one common Linux distro or worry about syncing libraries or whatever across the clients. Just the idea of having to install Maya on Fedora, with its finicky libraries and yum installs, gives me a headache - having to manage a cluster would be a complete mind-****.

Backburner was recently released for OS X with Smoke and it's going to be integrated with Maya 2011 (according to the Smoke docs)

[olson]

How would I set up a cluster to play safe with all of these pieces of software,all running on there own respective OS?

Short answer is you don't. Ideally everything should be on one platform so things like file paths and references are consistent (e.g. D:\scenes\whatever.mb compared to /mnt/scenes/whatever.mb). Its possible to do cross platform rendering but you have to be very diligent about how the scenes and assets are constructed. In cases where the software is only available for a single platform you have no choice like Final Cut Pro.

Since everything you're doing is so diverse and on separate platforms, setting up a farm and a queue might be more trouble than its worth. If you had a dozen machines all for rendering Maya and all on Linux it would be an easy answer but your case is not that straightforward. If it were my "pipeline" I'd just use VNC on each to start jobs when needed and not bother spending days setting up and troubleshooting a cross platform queue. Cheers!

[knowhate]

use Frantic Deadline. It is very good at cross-platform renderfarm things like this and works with pretty much anything you throw at it. It's also free for up to two slaves (unlimited CPUs on each slave). That way you won't have to screw around with one common Linux distro or worry about syncing libraries or whatever across the clients. Just the idea of having to install Maya on Fedora, with its finicky libraries and yum installs, gives me a headache - having to manage a cluster would be a complete mind-****.

Backburner was recently released for OS X with Smoke and it's going to be integrated with Maya 2011 (according to the Smoke docs)


Thanks for the response!

I will look into that OS. I'm still test driving OS's and because my pockets aren't lined with cash for this side project- it would be nice if I can find a "scalable" OS that can grow with me without too much "licensing fuss". Because of my brother and what he does, I usually have a good amount of PC's, laptops, and components available for this kind of use or else they usually get tossed and recycled.

At the moment - certain programs dont have a priority over the other, but it would be nice find an OS and manager to handle cross-platform capabilites (windows/mac)

How has Frantic Deadline worked for you - I would like to hear how its helped you.

cheers! :beer:

[knowhate]

Short answer is you don't. Ideally everything should be on one platform so things like file paths and references are consistent (e.g. D:\scenes\whatever.mb compared to /mnt/scenes/whatever.mb). Its possible to do cross platform rendering but you have to be very diligent about how the scenes and assets are constructed. In cases where the software is only available for a single platform you have no choice like Final Cut Pro.

Since everything you're doing is so diverse and on separate platforms, setting up a farm and a queue might be more trouble than its worth. If you had a dozen machines all for rendering Maya and all on Linux it would be an easy answer but your case is not that straightforward. If it were my "pipeline" I'd just use VNC on each to start jobs when needed and not bother spending days setting up and troubleshooting a cross platform queue. Cheers!

Olson, thanks for the response.

My pipeline is very very complex to say the least... At the moment I am looking to cease the less troublesome applications for this project - just to get 'em out of the way (i.e. after effects, maya). It would be nice if I could just set up a farm for JUST these apps, because that would alone take the load off for FCP renders on my main machine.

Do you have any recommendations on how to set up a simple Linux Farm- or what Linux Distro is the best of the bunch?

This has got me thinking now: Can you have cross-platform Maya projects sent to this Cluster/Farm if I were on either a Mac/PC?

cheers! :beer:

[olson]

I will look into that OS. I'm still test driving OS's and because my pockets aren't lined with cash for this side project- it would be nice if I can find a "scalable" OS that can grow with me without too much "licensing fuss".

Look into what OS? Deadline is a render queue manager not an operating system. If you want an operating system that is free and not encumbered by licensing then look no further than Linux. But you wouldn't be able to render anything from After Effects or Final Cut Pro in Linux since those applications are for Windows and OS X only (respectively).

There's more than one level here, the operating system, the applications, and the queue manager. Picking one queue manager over another isn't going to make things magically work across multiple operating systems because a pipeline isn't that simple. A queue manager exists simply to automate what command to run on what node to render a file. It won't make After Effects run on Linux or Final Cut Pro run in Windows. Having said that, Deadline isn't free anyway so you'll have licensing to worry about there too.

The best way to approach this is to setup a farm and queue for a single purpose and expand from there. Trying to get multiple applications and operating systems to work in a single queue manager from the start is not the way to go about it. Or for just a few machines don't use a queue at all and manually start jobs on each machine. Cheers!

[olson]

Olson, thanks for the response.

My pipeline is very very complex to say the least... At the moment I am looking to cease the less troublesome applications for this project - just to get 'em out of the way (i.e. after effects, maya). It would be nice if I could just set up a farm for JUST these apps, because that would alone take the load off for FCP renders on my main machine.

Do you have any recommendations on how to set up a simple Linux Farm- or what Linux Distro is the best of the bunch?

This has got me thinking now: Can you have cross-platform Maya projects sent to this Cluster/Farm if I were on either a Mac/PC?

cheers! :beer:

Autodesk officially supports Maya on Red Hat Enterprise Linux which isn't free (commercial support is mandatory for RHEL), but there's a free distribution based on RHEL but without the Red Hat branding (or support) called CentOS. You can download it from here and read about it.

http://mirror.centos.org/centos/5/isos/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CentOS

You'll probably want the 64-bit version if the hardware is 64-bit. Other distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora can work with a little tweaking but CentOS should work out of the box. On the Maya install disc there's RPM files which can be installed with just a few clicks, then handle license basically the same as Windows (through the FlexLM utilities).

Its possible to render scenes that are made on another platform if all of the plugins are on both platforms and all external paths are relative or UNC. Generally speaking though you want to create the scene on the same platform to simplify the pipeline if possible. If you're using a recent version of Maya it comes with a queue manager now (which I think works on Linux but not 100% sure). That would be a good place to start since its free and for sure works with Maya. If that doesn't work there are other free options like DrQueue, or Deadline if using only two nodes. Cheers!

EDIT: Also just noticed Autodesk supports Fedora 8 but might not be available anymore since its kind of old (relatively speaking).

[cgbeige]

Final Cut Pro uses Qmaster on OS X for renderfarming. I don't think Deadline handles FCP. Maya and After Effects are good with Deadline but if you're looking to offload the FCP work to something, it's going to have to be an OS X machine, hackintosh or whatever.

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