Wireless Network and Render Farm

[jgray]

I'm relatively new to distributed rendering, but I have a new computer on the way and want to develop a render farm.

Is it reasonable to run the farm on a wireless network? Will it be slower than a wired connection?

Joel

[instinct]

Yes it will. By FAR actually. In the best case a W-Lan net is operating at 54MBits. A standard LAN would be opertating at 100MBit already...and even that is tedious in my eyes. We went all 1GBit and will never ever go back...

Thorsten

[cpnichols]

Yes it will. By FAR actually. In the best case a W-Lan net is operating at 54MBits. A standard LAN would be opertating at 100MBit already...and even that is tedious in my eyes. We went all 1GBit and will never ever go back...

Thorsten

Keep in mind that even if it says 54mbits, it only runs at about 12 after all the security stuff on it. You can switch to the new "N" wireless

[dlparisi]

It's not unreasonable but not really preferred. Remember though that once the scene is transferred all computations happen locally on the machine until it needs to send the frame back (I think proxies and any dynamic memory items will still be transfered as needed though).

I've run a small 3 machine farm over phone line networking which is about 10mbit I believe. It was slow but the data got where it need to go and the frames finished. You can also check the "Include maps" box so all of the maps for a scene are transfered at one time to the slaves. This could "potentially" cut down on network traffic, depending on the scene. I too switched over to 1GBit and it's kind of amazing, makes my 100mbit laptop seem kind of slow.

EDIT: Just notice you are intending to utilize this farm for DR. Probably not the best option. The increased lag time for sending the data over the wireless will kill the advantage of DR especially for moderate size renders. By the time everything gets transfered the main machine could be nearly finished with the frame. Of course if it's a very large or slow image it still may be worth it. You could still utilize it for rendering frames of an animation though.

[jgray]

Yes it will. By FAR actually. In the best case a W-Lan net is operating at 54MBits. A standard LAN would be opertating at 100MBit already...and even that is tedious in my eyes. We went all 1GBit and will never ever go back...

Thorsten

Thanks for pointing that out. If I would have thought about it for a minute, I might have remembered that a wired connection was faster. I'm running out of room quickly though an I just hate all that spaghetti behind the computer (now it's going to be slung from one side of the room to another). I'm wondering if a dedicated computer cabinet is appropriate now, and some serious wire management systems. Ugh..

Joel

[jacksc02]

once you go rack you never go back

[jgray]

once you go rack you never go back

Can you recommend something that will work with 2 Boxx towers and 2 APC Back-ups XS 1000? Admittedly, I'm not into the hardware side of things like I should be.

Joel

[jacksc02]

i got no idea man!

[DaForce]

What I would suggest if room is a problem, is buy specifically built rack servers. Then just buy and appropriately sized rack and slot them in.. nice and neat

You "could" convert your old machines into rack machines, but not something you should do unless your rather competant in that sort of stuff.

Note: rack servers still have all the same cables as normal server... in a sense, but often you dont need mouse keyboard and monitor, as you would access them remotely via remote desktop or VNC.. so all they really need is power and network.