Rendering Farm
5 messages in this thread
I have a question on setting up a rendering farm. I'm looking to install 10
machines on a network to do traditional animaition. What I need to know is
this. The machines would be Pentium 90's with 32 megs of ram and 1 gig drives
each. What type of displays for the slave units, master units, and the server,
can I get away with? I will be using the PAR for input and output.
Chuck Rogers (Reel Images)
>> What type of displays for the slave units, master units, and the
>> server, can I get away with?
PMJI, but you can "get away with" a plain vanilla VGA card in each case. Of
course, that is not the "best" setup. If you are using the PAR for I/O of
animations, you can "get by" without a frame buffer (although I would recommend
one like the Illuminator Pro or AT Vista in one machine for good NTSC output to
preview specific frames). For net rendering, you will likely set the display
to NULL, so it doesn't matter what graphics card is in each of those.
However, if these machines will EVER serve any other purpose, get yourself a
good PCI or VLB hi-res/hi-color SVGA card. Others here may have some
recommendations.
What type of network software would you use?
Chuck Rogers (Reel Images)
>> What type of network software would you use?
For 2-5 computers, Lantastic is terrific. Any more than that you should look
into a full blown server-based Novell network (with good fast LAN cards).
Chuck,
>>> I have a question on setting up a rendering farm. <<<
AM Labs out of Addison Texas is getting ready to go in to production of a major
product/rendering farm solution.
It's called RenderGarden/RenderFarm or RenderJungle depending on the power of
the configuration. This is a much less pricy plus a more complete answer to
the traditional method of dealing with setting up networks and multiple pc's
for this.
You should call Matt Armstrong to inquire about this soon to be released
product directly at AM Labs Phone: 1-214-960-7915
Ask for Matt Armstrong specificly and tell him I (James Murphy) sent you.
You'll thank me later. <BG>
Murph'