Network Rendering
8 messages in this thread
Greetings 3D Artists!
Does Autodesk have a recommended network choice/setup
for render farms?
I have a number of machines throughout the company
which I put into slave mode each night – and during the
day when they're not being used.
My main problem is the network traffic and how it affects
the other people trying to work on the net.
I intend to have 10 machines as dedicated slaves plus another
12 machines being used at nights.
If I set up a seperate server/ring for the farm, what would
the pros and cons be? Where would the bottleneck of data be?
Also, what would be the best way of transferring files between
the PC network and Silicon Graphics machines – PC-NFS ?
It has been suggested that I use a Mac as a gateway between
PC and SG, but this doesn't seem ideal to me..
Thanks for any comments or suggestions.
Andy Roberts
BITS Corp
Hi Andy,
<< Where would the bottleneck of data be? >>
Reduce network traffic by placing IPAS routines, materials, maps and even
rendered images locally. The minimum traffic is then the copying of *.prjs to
each machine.
I'll leave the other questions to the forum..
jonas[adesk]
>> The minimum traffic is then the copying of *.prjs to each machine.
When net rendering, does the program first check your local "projects"
directory? I assumed that it always went to the "network" directory. If the
former is true, I'll get into the habit of copying over the .prj files.
– Dave
Hi David,
<< I assumed that it always went to the "network" directory. >>
It does.. I was trying to imply that if everything else is local then network
traffic is limited to the reading of *.prj files.
jonas[adesk]
Make sure to download 3DSNET.TXT from the library.
-Brian
Andy:
Hi there! We use PC-NFS here to hook up our Suns with PCs to render – at one
time or another we have had over 20 PCs rendering, SGIs, and various other
beasts attached with no problems.
If you have access to an SGI, just use it as a server. I set up Sony Pictures
Imageworks previsualization department with an SGI server using PC-NFS and
within a day had it all up and network rendering (back in the days when I did
such things!)
Let me know if you have any questions, I'd be glad to help out.
Greg Pyros
Hi Greg,
Thanks for the info – I guessed PC-NFS might be the solution.
In addition to the SG thang….
I want to have the render farm running off 1 server and another
server dealing with general office traffic. I'm guessing that it
would make sense to isolate the farm by putting it on a seperate
ring, and have both rings communicate through some kind of
gateway….
Some of the machines which would be on Server 1 (the office ring)
would be used for network rendering. How easy is it for machines
to share data across seperate rings?
Thanks again for all your help.
Andy Roberts
BITS Corp.
Andy:
>> I want to have the render farm running off 1 server and another server
>> dealing with general office traffic.
This would be easy to do by just having the two servers running with one
network. This would also avoid the problems of bridges/routers etc.
Just keep all your administrative stuff on one machine, and your 3DS stuff on
another. We found that it is slightly faster to have a separate disk (not
partition) for the common 3DS network directory, a separate disk for the
rendering output, and a separate disk for the maps and processes.
You might want to look into the Seagate Elite-9 9gig disks, UNIX and PC-NFS
allows you to use an entire disk as one huge partition, it's great for storing
output without worrying about running out of space!
Greg Pyros