Render farm for tight folks

[ali_cgi]

Hi guys,

Just wondering if I could get some advice on a really cheap way of gaining lots of cores, and the downsides, for a mixture of DR and Network Rendering.

The conclusion i've come to is to get a refurbished hp blade system, the post economical way seems to me seems to go back to the g5 blades, ddr2 memory. low core speeds, no hyper-threading and no turbo-boost on the chips.

I realise lower processor speeds are slower, I assume a 4.8ghz processor should be in reason almost exactly twice as fast as a 2.4ghz and then twice again if it supports hypertheading. Am I correct here?

Also Ram speed are there any real disadvantages to slower memory like ddr2 for rendering?

Bear in mind that this sort of system could give you 128 cores at 2.4ghz ish' , for less than 1000gbp and these will be purely render slaves, running either centos or windows 7 pro depending on a maya or max route,

The only downside to me at the minute would be the noise and weight of the things.

[fernanditogarces]

Have you seen this article already?, pretty good price/performance..

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-...-dual-xeon-pc/

[ali_cgi]

Looks good those processors are a ridiculously good price!!

[Morne]

Have you seen this article already?, pretty good price/performance..

http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-...-dual-xeon-pc/

Hmmm, interesting. Anybody else thinks this is an excellent alternative? Obviously these use a little more power though than the latest chips?

[AlexP]

Still undecided as to whether is better to have less cores + more GHz or vice versa
These are only 2.6GHz

[Morne]

Will probably suck as a workstation, but a DR server, hmmm

[ali_cgi]

The only issue I see with these chips regarding price, is needing either quite expensive motherboard to be able to use them, or a barebones workstation. Compared with second hand older gen hp blade server. You can house upto 32 cpu's at a very low cost.

Also any downsides to Amd chips for vray rendering? I never here of people using them much, but again price to power ratio seems interesting. Does embree work on amd?

Yep i'd like more info on clock speeds and if it just is higher equals more or are there other disadvantages of using really low 2.2ghz processors?

I read somewhere that with rendering you get no use out of the turboboost speeds on intel as your using all threads 'Can anyone confirm this'? And that hyper-threading doesn't necessarily mean double the speed

Yep energy is of some concern as well as the older you go the more energy your using usually.

Cheers!

[AlexP]

Which HP blade servers are you looking at?

[ali_cgi]

C7000's with probably bl680c gen 5 blades in , check ebay there loads on there.

These wont work with the cpu's mentioned in that article, unless you used the gen 8 blades i think but then it costs a lot more than 1000gbp

[Morne]

And that hyper-threading doesn't necessarily mean double the speed

With HyperThreading you only get about 15% to 25% increase, NOT 50% and definately not double

Which HP blade servers are you looking at?

I'd also like to know...

[AlexP]

C7000's with probably bl680c gen 5 blades in , check ebay there loads on there.

These wont work with the cpu's mentioned in that article, unless you used the gen 8 blades i think but then it costs a lot more than 1000gbp

Well, we have 2 x c7000 enclosures sat under the desks here, fully loaded as well.

I would absolutely not recommend them for home use, and only for use in an office that has a dedicated, COOLED, server room. With an IT guy who knows how to work with them, because they are not like regular computers.
They also sound like a jet engine taking off.

They are cheap as shit to buy, but cost a lot to run. We havent used them in years now because they are just too much hassle.

On paper it looks like you get a lot of bang for your buck, but unless you have the means to set them up properly, dont bother.


They also weigh about as much as a bus

[ali_cgi]

Haha yeah I realise they are beasts! I was thinking of trying to tame one! I was thinking of either putting it in the cellar which is pretty cold throughout the year, or garage.
Why dont you guys get much use out of them? What kind of problems do you have?
I was thinking of getting them running on centos if I went ahead, maya probably
Be great to get some advice from someone with experience, i'm quite used too dell racks servers on linux they are very loud but find once you know your way around them can be great to maintain with all the server features you get. But yes is a learning curve

[Morbid Angel]

More less powerful cores is always better. But the less power they have the more of them you gotta have to compensate. I've explained this in other threads. There are some things that can't be sped up, like IO for example (the time it takes to read/write data) from server. If you have 1-2 very fast machines and a frame takes 10 minutes just to load into memory, more slower machines will finish total frames faster. Same is true for DR, at each end and beginning of the frame this data must be passed around on the network. So unless you have 10 gb network, it won't be much faster.

[AlexP]

Haha yeah I realise they are beasts! I was thinking of trying to tame one! I was thinking of either putting it in the cellar which is pretty cold throughout the year, or garage.
Why dont you guys get much use out of them? What kind of problems do you have?
I was thinking of getting them running on centos if I went ahead, maya probably
Be great to get some advice from someone with experience, i'm quite used too dell racks servers on linux they are very loud but find once you know your way around them can be great to maintain with all the server features you get. But yes is a learning curve

Just soooo much hassle to set up and manage the software. But then if you already have the knowledge then thats one hurdle out the way.

For us the main issue was power and cooling, in the end it wasnt cost effective to pay for the AC.
We also would have needed additional power into the building, dedicated for our server room, which we also werent willing to pay for.

So we now have some very expensive and very very heavy coffee tables.

[ali_cgi]

Thanks Alex,
Energy is maybe something i'm overlooking here also, Im reading some horror stories of energy bills costing hundreds a month, I suppose these things are made to run 24/7 at some kind of load so maybe aren't designed for super low energy use when idle. Plus being pretty old now so energy concerns weren't as high priority with servers as it is today.

Just soooo much hassle to set up and manage the software. But then if you already have the knowledge then thats one hurdle out the way.

For us the main issue was power and cooling, in the end it wasnt cost effective to pay for the AC.
We also would have needed additional power into the building, dedicated for our server room, which we also werent willing to pay for.

So we now have some very expensive and very very heavy coffee tables.