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Hi Guys,
I'm wondering if anyone would be able to provide some comments/knowledge on Render farm set up(?).
This is a work related question, I've been asked to draft a budget for the upgrading of our office render farm.
Our render farm has been up and running for a few weeks now. The 'farm' is three, 5/6 year old Xeon workstations, networked by our IT department, under a desk in the corner of our office. The 'farm' seems stable and works well. It does speed up Vray rendering times and It has crashed only once so far (which I was equally surprised/pleased about, as I've given it quite a hard time!).
I generally need to render multiple views of a product, and sometimes multiple views of multiple products, on a 'overnight' timescale or more likely 'as soon as possible'.
These old work stations are helpful, but they are less than ideal, I've been reducing the resolution and quality of render output in order to get images output on time.
My ideal situation is; better quality, higher res. . . faster.
We are looking to replace these old machines with a current equivalent. I've had a quick look at some different options and found 3:
blade server setups - (seem to be total overkill for our office and unrealistically expensive)
Dedicated render nodes - (like what Boxx offer, seem really expensive for what you get, a single multicore processor in a case that is much smaller than a workstation 'tower'. . .?)
workstations - (bang for buck seems to be far higher here - essentially what we have already got but new!)
For Vray, based on previous experience, I'm guessing the two important things are:
a) processing power (i.e. more cores + more Ghz = best)
and,
b) memory (i.e. 4Gig/8Gig + Higher Mhz = better)
Graphics card is not an issue here as long as its enough to run the OS?!? (windows XP 64)
I'd like to get some professional opinions here, varied views, pros and cons of the above. Or even something completely obvious that I have missed! I need to get some constructive ideas on what I'm asking of our IT guys, and what we are looking to spec for these machines. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your comments!
Stuart Williamson.
I'm wondering if anyone would be able to provide some comments/knowledge on Render farm set up(?).
This is a work related question, I've been asked to draft a budget for the upgrading of our office render farm.
Our render farm has been up and running for a few weeks now. The 'farm' is three, 5/6 year old Xeon workstations, networked by our IT department, under a desk in the corner of our office. The 'farm' seems stable and works well. It does speed up Vray rendering times and It has crashed only once so far (which I was equally surprised/pleased about, as I've given it quite a hard time!).
I generally need to render multiple views of a product, and sometimes multiple views of multiple products, on a 'overnight' timescale or more likely 'as soon as possible'.
These old work stations are helpful, but they are less than ideal, I've been reducing the resolution and quality of render output in order to get images output on time.
My ideal situation is; better quality, higher res. . . faster.
We are looking to replace these old machines with a current equivalent. I've had a quick look at some different options and found 3:
blade server setups - (seem to be total overkill for our office and unrealistically expensive)
Dedicated render nodes - (like what Boxx offer, seem really expensive for what you get, a single multicore processor in a case that is much smaller than a workstation 'tower'. . .?)
workstations - (bang for buck seems to be far higher here - essentially what we have already got but new!)
For Vray, based on previous experience, I'm guessing the two important things are:
a) processing power (i.e. more cores + more Ghz = best)
and,
b) memory (i.e. 4Gig/8Gig + Higher Mhz = better)
Graphics card is not an issue here as long as its enough to run the OS?!? (windows XP 64)
I'd like to get some professional opinions here, varied views, pros and cons of the above. Or even something completely obvious that I have missed! I need to get some constructive ideas on what I'm asking of our IT guys, and what we are looking to spec for these machines. Any help would be appreciated!
Thanks in advance for your comments!
Stuart Williamson.
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