VRay and supercomputers

[j.galang]

Vlado and/or Peter,


How many processors do you think can Vray handle? For example a monster 128 processor Itanium based machine (like the one ILM uses)? Is there a limit to the scalability of Vray?


Thanks.


Joel

[Da_elf]

well. it says in the liscence that you can have up to 10 computers for the DR (unlimited processors) so if you have a computer with 128 processors then you can have 10 of those to do DR hehehe

[Night Walker]

if you have a computer with 128 processors then you can have 10 of those to do DR hehehe

Vlado, Da_elf's right?

[j.galang]

Well, actually I was more concered about if Vray can operate in such a system, the licensing issue is secondary. Any thoughts Vlado?

JG

[RErender]

after reading http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/hpc/faq.asp I would think it would work with the command line rendering in max6.

[cpnichols]

First of all, if ILM DID have a 128proc Itanium machine, which I don't think they do, I would say they would not use it for surface rendering. Itaniums are only useful for 64bit processing, and the huge amount of ram that can use. So again, IF they DID have one, it would primarily be used for stuff like fluid sim or voxel rendering. Rendering is still mainly used on standard dual procs these days. It would be better anc cheaper to have 300 dual procs (= to 600 procs) then one big 128 proc itanium. Also keep in mind that itaniums are pretty slow at around 1.5 ghz, and cost around $1,500 to $2,000 each.

As far as command line rendering... with the standalone, you should soon be seeing vray's OWN command line, similar to prman.

[j.galang]

Sorry my mistake.

It was this computer I was reffering to is this.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983898.html

Will Vray run on computers like this?


Thanks.

[Miguel]

Well I'm no expert but think that V-Ray would run in this machines, after all they are Xeons and a lot of people in this forum uses them for rendering, the problem is the OS, currently V-Ray cannot run in Linux (as far as I know, maybe there is a ultra secret build that can), so if you are planning to buy a rack of these things, make sure that you choose Microsoft Windows® :P

[cpnichols]

Sorry my mistake.

It was this computer I was reffering to is this.

http://news.com.com/2100-1001-983898.html

Will Vray run on computers like this?


Thanks.

These are not one computer but a series of computer... so it would act as a traditional farm. The only difference is that they take up a lot less footprint since they are very small. Basically it would be like having 60, 100, 200 computer all in a place of a traditional rack mount cabinet. they probably have 10 cabinets each having 100 procs... making 1024 procs. Don't think of it as a supercomuter, but as a a lot of normal computers... also keep in mind that this news is from 02/2003

to answer your question... yes, vray... as with any rendering engine... would run fine on this.

[Randy]

exactly a blade acts as a renderfarm, so you could use 10 blades with a vray license. I have 8-way and 4-way xeons here, working great with vray. since vray is running only on windows platform, the maximum cpu count on each machine would be 32 (running windows datacenter on it) and this windows-license would cost over 32k$. imo a total insane solution "just for rendering".