How many DR nodes do YOU use at work?

[cgrant3d]

How many DR nodes do you typically have access to at work?

If you're at a large studio and you guys have 100 nodes, I'd assume that many of em are running backburner tasks 24/7 and some others are dedicated to DR tasks right? So how many DR nodes does a typical artist have access to? ... If you're at a smaller shop or freelance, how many nodes were you able to justify?

I ask partly out of curiosity and partly because I want to use the information to help put together a business case for more render nodes... Thanks!

[gfa2]

I work at a decent size Architectural firm (700+/- employee's) and I have about 60 computers for after-hours renderfarm and 6 computers for use with DR 24x7. Across those 6 computers I have 40 CPU cores...so 40 buckets anytime I hit the Render button. More if it's after-hours...which is way too often .

[DrJan]

700+ employees is decent sized? *falls over*

I work for an Interior Architect with 12 employees (including the interns and the "maid") and we have two full licensed workstations with a render node each, all QuadCore (and those are used for work during the day)
Sometimes I wished I'd had a dedicated render machine next to my workstation, but unfortunatly they can't (or won't) afford it...

[paulison]

i think we only have around 20 dualcore machines at the office but this is for dedicated 3D work and is split between about 5 people at the moment. I think they prefer to use DR more than backburner.

I work at home though with a workstation and 2 slaves but never use DR. generally I set the scene up and click render and don't need test renders. If i need to test something I let the slaves handle one complete image each. It takes longer to see the results but usually there is a backlog of work to start work on while i wait. when you use DR it ties the machine up so it feels like timewasting to me. Maybe there is a better way for me...but for now it works. I always have tasks in the backburner queue (269 since Nov 2007) and they always seem to catch up if i leave then on 24/7, mostly because of weekends.

back on topic though, when I worked in the office we had about 1/3 of the machines available for backburner tasks (you can strip render to 6 machines and get resonable speed) and the other machines were split between employees so everyone had a few available each. if someone had an urgent task then they could use all 20 machines as we were able to have backburner and DR running on all machines at the same time without any problems.

One thing to note is that if we did animations, 20 machines would be nowhere near enough. as a result we pretty much only do still images and do not guarantee same day turnarounds on amendments. many of my images take 6-12+ hours to rerender because i don't want to compromise on settings or resort to LWF.

i think you can only answer the question yourself of how many machines you need because of how varied everyones workflow and approach is. do your clients require instant tunaround times or are they ok to wait till the next day even for a simple colour change? (i realise that there are many ways to speed up turnarounds without adding more machines). How many staff share the machines?. Are your current machines ALWAYS rendering?

I think the important thing to remember is that adding too many machines adds a lot of cost and if you arnt using them all, you are not earning the money to pay for them. Also, even a bank of 20 machines uses an absolute shitload of power and the powerbills just get rediculous!. I think you really need to keep track of idle time on the machines - are you using them all?. If you do one animation a year is it worth getting 100 machines to do this one project and then have most of them sit idle? I think this is why we dont have more machines, but then again ~ 20 is a good balance for us in our market even though we have a high volume of work, we can insist that amendments take 1-2 days to complete. (mostly small residential). If we have a large project or the occasional small animation we can fudge our way through usually even with our minimal resources by precalculating and having clients sign off on still frames and wireframes prior to rendering starting.

That probably doesnt help with your own situation though?

If you think you need more, get them but its just a matter of finding the right balance. In the past we have bought a clump of 5-6 machines at a time and phasing out the oldest clump when required. If you have a lot of consistant work coming in you can justify getting more machines in one hit.

[QuakeMarine1]

depending on the image I have 31 x 8core xeons working one image

just 620ghz or 248 bucktes