How To: Building Your Own Render Farm

Page 5 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.
Toggle sidebar Toggle sidebar
Status
Not open for further replies.
Nice article. Could any of you point me to an article about how I can build a beowulf network. I just want to build one for the sake of getting to know how to do it.
 
[citation][nom]sanchz[/nom]Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't 30 million hours be 30,000,000/24 = 1,250,000 days which would in turn be 1,250,000 / 365 = 3,425 YEARS!!! 😵Please someone clarify this. How could they render a movie for 3,000 years? Did they have this render farms hidden in Egypt??[/citation]
Yeah sure, man. Or the other (more popular) option, is to understand that each processor or workstation performing 1 hour of work equals 1 hour of work. If you have 1000 processors running simultaneously for 1 hour, that's 1000 hours. Umkay?
 
For those that want a good render farm based solution for audio work, check out Reaper at www.reaper.fm. It's a great sequencer, full 64bit internal processing on both x32 or x64 computer systems and supports fully operational VST rendering through all your network computers. Also don't let the low price full you, a little search on the net and the manual and you can see it's by far if not the best, one of the best and more advanced sequencer ever made. 🙂 Good luck! The Joystick Man
 
There are three ways to approach acquiring systems for a render farm: building your own, having a builder make them for you, or buying pre-built boxes. Each approach has its own set of advantages and disadvantages.for more info google out renderrocket.
 
Use of render farms shouldn't be just restricted to large studios and 3D artists. Smaller studios have their own render farms and many freelance artists have them as well. Compositors and freelance motion-graphics artists can also make use of them. Some editing systems support the use of additional machines called render nodes to accelerate rendering, and this type of setup can be extended to architectural visualization and even digital audio workstations.for more info google out renderrocket.
 
haha and now we have CUDA NVIDIA GPU processing...less than 2 years later!
 
*haha and now we have CUDA NVIDIA GPU processing...less than 2 years later!*

HAHA For most people still onusable, i personally think it will last another year before it can be implemeting in my workflow...



 
Great post but you may find Renderfarms are so cheap now its not worth the time and power costs trying to set up some old computers when you can just contact a renderfarm and render projects for £20 I used a site called www.rendernow.co.uk they were very understanding when I said i was a student with limited funds.
 
wow, rendernow doesn't even have pricing data yet, or their renderfarm capabilities, or what renderers they have on... must be great to use a farm that doesn't even have enough data to make it useful.

There are reasons to not use a web renderfarm:

-They may not have your renderer (of the ones posted above, only half support my 3D app of choice)
-They may not have your plugins (common, especially with very expensive plugins or custom written ones)
-You may end up sitting in a queue for hours to days, or you pay 'premium' price to get bumped up in the queue.
-Most of them don't handle rendering for compositing software.
-If your render uses a lot of large image sequences, it is very possible even with modern broadband connections to spend longer uploading your scene than it would take to render it locally.

I've been using web-based renderfarms- specifically, Respower.com, which has bben around since 2000- for awhile and know about them, and sometimes it is still more convenient to render things locally.
 
If the number of cores is more important than processing power, there comes a point where the Raspberry Pi (or Beaglebone, or Cubieboard) becomes relevant. Assuming 2 Amps 5 Volts [ie. 10 Watts], the single rack unit would suck enough juice to drive 26 boards. 1KW = 100 cores [big new PCs can have a supply rated at 1KW].
The next bottleneck? Software - optimised for ARM processors.
 
no, it really isn't in that case. A Raspberry Pi is next to useless for rendering.

1: not enough memory. The machine has the same amount of memory than we used at FI 12 years ago.
1a. 32-bit CPU, so not even the possibility to have enough RAM to load a proper modern scene.
2: you'd need '26 boards' to equal the performance of a single decent processor.

As a note, if you're building rackmount PCs as render nodes, they are far more likely to have 500 or even 300w power supplies rather than 1 kw. Remember: no discrete GPU in most of them.
 
Hey Guys, Im new to animation and here is a set up that Ive been quoted to run C4D, we need to create animations prob between 3 and 5 minutes in length, one at a time. The set up is as follows:

2 x Xeon DP 5620 (4x2.4GHz) Quad Core 12MB CPU + Cooler
Intel Shady Cove Dual Processor Xeon Server Motherboard
2 x Quadro 2000 1GB 128bits DDR3 Workstation Cards In SLI
NZXT Switch 810 Full Tower Case Black
Corsair Professional PLATINUM AX1200i 80+ Fully Modular PSU
24GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3 1333Mhz ECC Register RAM
Intel STS100C Combo Socket 1366 Heatsink & Fan
Corsair Force GT 120GB r: 555mb/s w: 515mb/s SSD
750GB Western Digital 7200RPM SATA3 6.0Gb/s HDD

With this type of setup do I need a render farm?
 
still need rendering machines? depends on your render time per frame, but likely, yes

the 2x quadro 2000s are not a great idea since the quadro 2000 is so memory-limited.
 
May be better use free render services instead of reinventing the wheel Here is a real free render farms list (not cloud) http://rentrender.com/free-render-farms/
 
Hi there, has anyone been able to replicate this cost effectiveness for i7s? the prices have gone down but now there aren't any LGA1115 socket motherboards that can fit in the supermicro CSE 512L. The X9 series of Supermicro together with the Xeon Proc is way steeper than what was presented in this (very awesome) article
 
I haven't done the price/performance comparison for newer i7/i5/i3 processor and Xeons yet. When this article was written, the i5 and i3 weren't out yet. I'd like to do an update when i have the time.
 
Rebooting doesn't seem to be the best way for upgrade. I myself assembled my used parts ( <a href="http://www.spectra.com/">www.spectra.com</a>
) and server. I get the fullest of its system, I guess learning the compatibility of parts is a good factor.
 
I would like to rent render farm service, it is much convenient and cost effective, we don't need to buy hardware and configure computers, we don't need to suffer the hardware derating, we can enjoy the around the clock service and fast rendering result. But anyway, everyone should evaluate whether we should rent such render farm which depends on several reasons.
Check here to learn whether you should rent a render farm service: https://medium.com/p/should-i-rent-a-render-farm-service-e3b6b6e08c53
 
Yep, but when this article was written, many online renderfarms were difficult to use, unreliable, or in some cases were using machines whose configurations were inadequate for even then. These days, there are cases when you need local systems doing the rendering and cases where using an online renderfarm is preferable. This article was published here on Tom's almost six years ago and the landscape has changed significantly since.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

TRENDING THREADS

Latest posts

Moderators online

Share this page

COMPANY
RESOURCES
FOLLOW
Top Bottom