Setting up a render farm
-
OK, Vray folks, I'd love help figuring out how to set up a scalable, cost-effective render farm. thomthom has had some good suggestions scattered about the forum, but he suggested I start a new topic to brainstorm. Here are some starting questions/topics:
- Hardware vs. Finances: What is the best bang-for-your buck hardware?
- Legal: How many nodes are you allowed to install using a single Vray license?
- Financial vs. Design Process: In this economy, what is a good balance between cost and added render speed?
A few thoughts I've read and will repeat here:
- It may help cut costs to use all-in-one motherboards with video and network on-board, since the quality of those items are much less important.
- The Intel i7 950 may be a good bang-for-your-buck CPU. What do you think? Can we do better?
- Does doubling the number of cores always halve the render time? The whole core-to-speed calculation is important to optimizing my setup economically because if I typically keep my renderings under 2 hours and let's say a 15 minute rendering is plenty fast, then it would be a waste of money to get more than 32 cores... which is a bit of a silly calculation because I won't have the money to get 8 quad core CPUs. But you get the point.
- Are multi-threaded processers financially helpful?
So tell me what you think.
-
I'm currently looking to find a set of motherboards that has a network card and graphic adapter built-in. Then I want to find the best bang for bucks combination with number of motherboards combined with n-speed CPU.
Each motherboard will also need a small HD and some RAM. (Since V-Ray runs inside SU, no need with more than 4GB.)I wonder if it's possible to get PSU's that can power multiple motherboards - in order to save components and space.
The main challenge is finding how to mount these motherboards - as I see no need to have a computer case for each node. Some kind of frame of sorts. I saw a DIY projet that used an IKEA file cabinet to mount the motherboards in.
-
Hi,
is there a online sketchup vray farm?
i want to use it for future work. -
One limiting factor in terms of economy is OS licensing. Do you know if it's possible to run drspawner in a linux environment? Either with Wine or Linux native? Otherwise, you're also buying an OS for each of those boards. One though it server motherboards that can mount dual or quad CPU's but then the processors and boards are more expensive, plus need a better case and cooling, etc... Lots of variables in all this. I'll be interested to see where this thread goes.
-
VfSU doesn't support online render farms. Only LAN farms.
-
@thomthom said:
VfSU doesn't support online render farms. Only LAN farms.
Is this still the case with regards to vfsu and online rendering ?
-
Technically you can do renders over the internet. I could potentially have a render farm at work that I'm connected to via my home computer and I can render anywhere. The catch is Asset Transfer. We cant guarantee fast enough asset transfer via an internet connection, so we don't currently support it.
@thomthom said:
Each motherboard will also need a small HD and some RAM. (Since V-Ray runs inside SU, no need with more than 4GB.)
In regards to a small render farm, Ill have to disagree with you about the 4GB Thom. While Sketchup may only be able to access up to 4GB, V-Ray can access as much as necessary via the 64bit workflow (see attached). It bypasses the limitations Sketchup has when it renders, and is ideal for network rendering.
I've been looking into doing something similar to the Helmer-Air render farm: http://www.helmer-air.com/ but much cheaper. If you go with something like Micro ATX Motherboard with on board graphics, a minimum of 8GB of ram, and an AMD FX-8350, you can put together a 40-48 core render farm for under $4,000 (not including cost for an Win7/8). Weve been using the AMD 8 Processors in a few of our machines now and they seem to be very reliable and only a hair slower than the Intel Core i7's. But what you lack in speed on your farm you make up in render buckets!
Now I've never tested this configuration, but its an experiment I'm looking to try. If anybody figures it out before me let me know!
-
@tedvitale_cg said:
In regards to a small render farm, Ill have to disagree with you about the 4GB Thom. While Sketchup may only be able to access up to 4GB, V-Ray can access as much as necessary via the 64bit workflow (see attached). It bypasses the limitations Sketchup has when it renders, and is ideal for network rendering.
Note that this thread was from 2012 - vray was very limited at the point...
Things are much happier these days with the external spawner
-
Ha, good point. I missed the date on the thread. I thought Thom knew about it, but now it makes complete sense why he said that, it didn't exist at the time!
-
Yea, that was written "back in the days" - because you added all the extra awesomeness!
Advertisement