Render Farm Suggestions?

#1

Hi CGsocieters,

I am a freelance artist and I try to work from my home studio most days for various companies. I have over the last year considered that I need more fire power, in particular I would like to build a render farm.

Currently, I have a couple systems I rely on, one fully loaded Mac G5 and an HP 64bit dual core. I mostly use Maya, Shake, After Effects as far as things that need to go to a render farm.

I am considering just buying quad core systems (not mac) and brute forcing a small network together. Any suggestions on systems or software?

When I look at servers, whether they are Apple or PC I am often lost… more so in the endless options on the PC side especially when some websites share no costs until you speak to a rep. I want to be able to start a render farm that I can expand upon… it doesn’t have to start huge, but even one system that is expandable or that I can rack might be better than something that I buy more RAM for in a crunch.

Any ideas or advice appreciated. I’m feeling like this is something that should be discussed in the current CG society where the individual is often reading unrealistic articles about Weta or Pixar and unattainable assets instead of Joe the Artist who cobbled together six Sony PS3s to make a supercomputer render farm.

And bonus kudos if you know how to hack the Sony PS3 to created a super computer renderfarm. :wink:

-Finn

#2

My current feeling with servers is cheap and plentiful.

You’re far better off with a bunch of cheap, but slow servers than a few fast ones.

Once you take into account all the parts required to build some fancy Xeon machine, you’ll find you could have built 2 or 3 desktops for the same sort of price.

Not only do you end up with more actual computing power, you can scale easier, and if something goes wrong, you’ll likely only loose a small fraction of your rendering capability.

Whilst the PS3 is blindingly fast, and has a CPU that is perfectly designed for rendering, it’s total lack of memory makes it a bad choice - also it’s not i386/x64 and so there won’t be many apps that run on it.

#3

Thanks for your response. It’s true I’ve looked into creating a PS3 supercomputer. There is published work on how to do it, but yes the caveat is that there are no apps that run on it, it’s all in the name of science right now.

#4

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