Rendering off-site and the 'cloud'

[tricky]

We have been talking in our office about the future of in-house rendering, and if it will actually be 'necessary' in a couple of years time to run a small, on-site render farm like so many smaller archvis companies do.

Business elecricity bills are always climbing, and machine specs are wildly out-of-date and underperforming (from both a speed point of view and a power useage point of view) 3 months after they are built. Updates to software (main applications with their continual updates and plugin updates to comply with the main application updates) are a pain to keep on top of. One of the biggest ball-aches in a busy studio is keeping all render famr machines in check. Also, some of our render machines only have 4GB memory - it becomes expensive to upgrade them, and to some extent, it feels like we are flogging a dead/dying horse with these kind of upgrades.

I briefly (ever so briefly) tried out Rebus Farm for a recent animation job. After a few hiccups that I didn't really have enough time to resolve entirely, we did manage to get some test rendered frames created in a relatively small amount of time. One of the major drawbacks was with the upload (from our end) of the various assets for a particular job. Animated trees for example can easily be well over 1GB in size, and these just couldn't be uploaded in any reasonable period of time.

However, fibre broadband is now being introduced across the country, and this promises upload speeds of 15-20MB/s. This could make remote farm rendering more realistic.

Rendering is not the only possibility, but the actual main applications that we use can be accessed remotely with desktop virtualisation technologies. This means that we can access our work from anywhere with an internet connection.

I wondered what this forums' thoughts are on these matters. Is anyone trying to implement off-site rendering at the moment, or even desktop virtualisation for that matter. The 'cloud' seems to offer us a lot, but is there a good way to get the ball rolling.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

Supporting and managing render farm is not an easy task. You have to keep tabs on technology and market - sell 2-3 year old systems and buy new ones. Its constant evolution. If you have machines with 4 gb ram then you waited for a little bit too long with them.

Good news is that technology is getting better producing smaller, cheaper, less energy consuming units. I've currently been thinking of using Q2860M model cpus to build render farm - only 44 wat for 3.5 ghz with good colling ! U run 32 gb of ram that cost 300$ and you can be set for few years...

Cloud wise - yes its an more and more possible option to work with. I'm currently only interested in Amazon EC2 and Render Flow (due to their LOW prices) - I'm more for Amazon tho since I can remote descopt and all plugins checks etc etc straight with no big problems - also they give u 1 year free PC to use - which I can easily use to set up windows, managers and so on that run 24/7...

Remote descopt is soo easy now that I use it everyday to move assets around my network between home and work...


There are big benefits of having home grown render farm and off-site render farm. Its hard to give decisive answer as to which one to use - u just have to look at ur work, prices, time, and pick the one that works for you. Above all remember to keep hardware in check and sell parts you dont need... U should be able to get 25-65% back from what you pay for it which is not such a big lose...

Also creating a smart image of your hdd windows and software is a good idea so updating new software to slaves require you to run only sync software with main source HDD...

[samuel_bubat]

Well I would go with a small renderfarm in the office. We have 20 pure rendering machines and including the air condition it´s roughly
1500eur per year in electricity costs. This is enough render power for most of our projects.
As renderslaves we take the cheapest machines possible. for example we use Alternate (a german hardware shop) to configure our machines online.
Fastest possible (cost efficient) CPU, as much RAM as possible.. and the rest just as cheap as possible. Costs around 6-800eur per machine.
Depending on the amount of rendertime you have, other solutions may be cheaper.
But the advantages for me are. Full control about everything, plugins updates etc.
We sometimes have sensitive customer data that may not be given out of house anyway.
If there is really to much to render than you could still outsource some renderings to rebus for example.
About cloud rendering I´m very doubtfull. It´s cheap now, untill everyone is using it and than I bet you´ll see a massive price increase.
Also things like this can happen
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/cloud/36...-cloud-offline

[tricky]

including the air condition it´s roughly
1500eur per year in electricity costs.

I guess this sort of calculation is a good starting point.

[samuel_bubat]

But please keep in mind, this is very rough number. It depends on many factors ! Especially on the aircondition used.
For example we keep our server room at ~20-22°. Not optimal for the machines but saves alot of money. So far they all survided
But it also depends alot on the amount you have to render.

[tricky]

But please keep in mind, this is very rough number. It depends on many factors ! Especially on the aircondition used.
For example we keep our server room at ~20-22°. Not optimal for the machines but saves alot of money. So far they all survided
But it also depends alot on the amount you have to render.

I doubt you even need to go as low as 20-22 for the server room. As long as they are reasonably stable temps, you could probably go a degree or two higher than that.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

As long as they dont go above 70 degree go as high with server room as u want ! Just dont warm the earth too much! :]

[Morne]

For now I'm sticking to a small in house farm also. Here the entry broadband speeds are slow and for the fast stuff its just too expensive. I will be upgrading my broadband to a "middle" somewhere in the next 2 or 3 months however. But I also dont see myself transferring gigs of data to an offsite renderfarm any time soon

[tricky]

As long as they dont go above 70 degree go as high with server room as u want ! Just dont warm the earth too much! :]

What bugs the hell out of me is that more often than not, here in the UK, its pretty cold - at least for 1/3 of the year. Despite that, we still end up having to chill our server room and have the central heating on for the office. If we could just heat the office with the excess heat of the render machines, and chill the server room with the cold outside air, we'd save a number of small planets!

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Thats what I do in my little office at home =D no need central heating if I render lol... Where are you guys located?

[tricky]

Thats what I do in my little office at home =D no need central heating if I render lol... Where are you guys located?

Oxford (not enough characters) in Oxfordshire (enough characters)

[tammo]

I think you need both.
A small renderfarm for day2day business like distributed rendering, short or not time critical animations, rendering a range of views over night, testrendering animations with smaller resolution or by skipping frames.

For rendering HD animation i started using cloud renderfarms.
It just takes too long to render Full HD from complex scenes that are 2000 frames long.
I would have to buy at least 5 times the amount of PCs that i currently have.

Just managing such a large amount of PCs would take away too much of my time.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Currently we open new office in NY and it looks like were going to be using Cloud there for a while :]

As long as you have 200-400ghz in ur home then the rest can be done on cloud...

[skogskalle]

I run a small (one man) arch-viz business, and i simply cant afford a nice and big renderfarm inhouse. It would also be too much work to keep the farm up to date. Ive been using Rebusfarm alot lately and its fast as hell when you need it to be, and very affordable if you let it render on a single comp. For not so stressful projects I usually render on my workstation during nights/weekends. Its working alright, but the danger as I see it is what happens if Rebus crashes/goes offline 3 hours before deadline? I fear im getting a bit too dependent (is that the correct word?) on it.

[Rhys]

I've tried a few options of render farms out, so far the main problem I have in the upload. Which as you say is changing in the uk. I still think you require a small amount of machines inhouse to do tests on and render day to day then send the full res version to render on a farm. Problem is farms are made for animations more than stills. Yes rebus does an option where it distributes. I just watched my money burn away when that option was on.

A quick look around I was working out that a render was costing me £25 for a scene that would take 5-6 hours to render on my current spec @ a res of 5-6k.

My main issue with render farms is that it wants to package the job up and send it off each time, so if you have a scene with 2 or 3 cameras you have to send the scene up each time. Work around of course is to animate one camera over 3 frames.

We decide on 3-4 machines in house as dedicated nodes, of course the workstations would free up over night adding power..... and anything bigger would send out.