Stratus Farm on Amazon?

[PixelJockey]

Has anyone tried out this Amazon.com based render farm?

http://www.stratusfarm.com/

[Guest]

I really want to try out this cloud rendering, but I don't understand enough about it.

[vance3d]

I took a look at it and couldn't really figure out whether it was a good deal or not. the method they are using to determine processing units seems a bit weird. I read somewhere that what I think they refer to as an "EC2" is based on a 1 ghz 2007 processor. not to mention that I don't think they support vray 2.0 yet and I think they only go up to max 2011 as well.

I would be interested if anyone can comment as to their experience with it and how it compares to other render farms.

V Miller

[Guest]

Why cant we sign up to the Amazon cloud and submit our PC as a renderer for others to use. We must have our PC online for a fixed amount within a month, in return we can render using other PC's that are in the cloud doing the same thing. So you pay for rendering by allowing others to use your PC to render.

Why do we have to go through render farms etc? Is it really complicated to get set up or something? Its all about sharing resources, rather than just paying silly amounts of money to a businesses.

[vance3d]

Amazon wants to dominate. I don't think they would be interested in doing something for free. But I like the idea of a rendering service on the lines of seti@home and other ventures that make use of available cpu power spread across the net. There is the consideration of all the maps that would need to be available to all the renders and the vray license itself. It would be a huge undertaking for sure but it would be awesome.

V Miller

[Guest]

Well there is this http://www.vswarm.com/ not sure how good it is but it seems to be along the same lines.

[vance3d]

The web provides. It looks cool even if it has limited software support for the time being. I'll have watch that to see if it is viable.

V Miller

[Guest]

I would love to fund/start a project like this i just don't have the expertise for any programming etc.

[vance3d]

Maybe you should start a thread on kickstarter to see if anyone would like to take it on.

V Miller

[Guest]

It would be interesting to know how complicated it would be to set something like this up on Amazon or where ever. I guess the problems lie with as you said textures, as well as licenses.

[vlado]

Why cant we sign up to the Amazon cloud and submit our PC as a renderer for others to use. We must have our PC online for a fixed amount within a month, in return we can render using other PC's that are in the cloud doing the same thing. So you pay for rendering by allowing others to use your PC to render.

Amazon makes certain guarantees about its cloud machines (that's why it takes the money); it can't take responsibility for your machine at home.

Why do we have to go through render farms etc? Is it really complicated to get set up or something? Its all about sharing resources, rather than just paying silly amounts of money to a businesses.

It *is* complicated Especially for something like rendering. Not that it cannot be done, but it's not trivial.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Guest]

Just thinking aloud, would it be something that Chaos Group would be interested in supporting? If not Amazon then how has vswarm doing it? They seem to be doing this sharing thing.

[vlado]

We've had some thoughts in that direction of course; can't say much more for the moment.

Best regards,
Vlado

[beestee]

I really like the idea of a BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC) render farm service...i have three excellent render nodes that have been sitting almost idle for 2+ months now and would welcome the idea of them getting some use now in exchange for when I get in a pinch down the road where I might need more than they are able to provide immediately.

[dlparisi]

I really like the idea of a BYOPC (Bring Your Own PC) render farm service...i have three excellent render nodes that have been sitting almost idle for 2+ months now and would welcome the idea of them getting some use now in exchange for when I get in a pinch down the road where I might need more than they are able to provide immediately.

Exactly.. The biggest thing I'd worry about though is abuse of the system and how it would be regulated. On one hand I don't want one guy on the other side of the globe using my small farm (and others) continuously to render out his 288 hour/frame POS while he has a 5 year old Pentium 4, but on the other hand I don't want to be limited when I have a deadline and I need to get a 4000 frame animation done by Tuesday. I'm not sure how this would be administered to make it fair.