Render farm

[The Craftsman]

Hey, did anybody know to set up a personal render farm for vray use...I am more interested towards rack setup which is easily moveable and take less space...and which processors prefer...Intel or AMD I heard that intel is good for it... too much confused guys...please advise me if anybody knows about it or anybody successfully running it.

[The Craftsman]

THANKS guy's for your overwhelming response...

[sconlogue]

Lol! I run a farm of roughly 10-12 machines depending on how they are all feeling that day. The trick is weighing factors like performance, cost, power consumption, ease of setup/management and reliability.

You could do anything from order a BOXX rack rig or some other canned solution at a significant cost to building your own from the ground up on the cheap. I personally have always gone with self-builds because of the considerable savings.

Currently I run rack chassis (4 & 2 RU) with Intel Core i7's of various flavors ranging from 2600K's to 3800K's (the K's are unlocked, so overclockable) and speeds of 3.1 Ghz thru 3.8 Ghz. All have 8 GB Ram or more. This gives me a fast set of 8 threads per machine at a pretty reasonable cost ($650-$9,000 per node) Core i7's run pretty cool and are a better value compared to their Xeon counterparts. Very reliable as well. I used to run AMD render nodes but found the were overall a bit under powered.

My setup does use more wattage & takes up more space then going with half the number of machines using dual socket xeons, but the cost per machine is about 1/2 or better for the same performance.

I use Maxwell, Mental Ray and Vray on the farm and they all run smoothly together. I also use Vray DBR as needed and it works very well in this configuration. I run Max 2012 but use backburner 2008 still as I have found backburner 2012 to be very flaky.

Also I suggest getting Motherboards that fully support "wake on LAN" so that you can remotely boot all your nodes if needed. I do this from home sometimes if I need to submit an animation but won't be in the studio that day. Very handy, just bit of a pain to setup initially.

Hope that helps.

[WiseRebel]

Hi there,

Its all about budget, how much do you want to spend per Node? If its going to be in a rack will there be enough cooling? do you have any issues with noise?

Processors its got to be Dual Intel Xeon 64Bit Processors if your budget has the cash, I'd say at least 8-12 GB of ram per Node and a robust Gigabit Network Interface.

Boxx have some amazing systems and workstation specialist as well.

Render nodes can end up costing a hell of a lot of money, there very noisy and you have to keep in mind cooling. But are very fast!!

I run a smallish render farm in my office, 8 machines with i7's CPU's that I've build myself, each has 12GB of RAM, running Windows 7 64 bit and one with a Dual Core Xeon X5650 as my main machine, using backburner to manage it.

Its not easily moveable but is a lot cheaper then a rack system.

Si

[glimpse]

Why do You need a renderFarm? Are You good at the moment? Do You use the awailable power to the best? Efficiently enough?


Why i ask this? Building render farm for CPU if You're a pro - cool enought - do it! but considering Your questions i might assume..

Think about a possibility to switch from CPU to GPU - you'll get one graphic card for let's say 500$ and it will have computing power ten pc with good enough CPU onboard.

yeah, you should now the limitation (that are quite few at the moment) but if you can get out with that that, it makes sence: The workflow is easier - basicly these are unbiased renders.

Unbiased renders are bit easier to work, but they require more power. On the other side they give much more possibility to play artisticaly rather then technicaly.

Scalability for gpu's are awesome too: buy a motherboard with five x8 extention slots and let's say put one 580, later on you can add like for more 6xx or even Quadro/Teslas (if You get good cashback) & have some more complex projects.


On the bottom line, if You're new enough - invest Your time for educating yourself and don't spend money for cool setups, render farms..it's not the power, but Your knowlegde that matters most.