Greg - Beowulf Cluster

[ZepSOFD]

Greg,

Over at the MAX forums you mentioned recently seeing realtime RT on a racksaver system. Could MAX/VIZ be configured to run on a home grown Beowulf system? If so, do you have any general thoughts or notes on what would be required on the software side of this or maybe some links on success or failure of such attempts?

 

Thanks,

Tom

[Greg Hess]

IF you were running a Distributed renderer....(Vray supports DR now, Brazil will eventually...) Yes you could make use of a large group of cpu's to attack a single frame.

 

Realtime though...I doubt.

 

However with a gigabit network (1000mbit), you could probably come pretty close.

 

The question is...what would be the magical # of cpu's to most effectively tackle a job. The problem with DR is that it takes time to send the job to all the machines...so at some point DR would actually be SLOWER then just rendering normally...so thus you have to setup your scenes to take advantage of the fact you have 20 or so cpu's working on different segments of the scene.

 

I'm currently using a Dual 1900+ MP and a 2.66B P4 with Vray to do scene renders. So fast, so very fast.

 

[ September 04, 2002, 05:48 AM: Message edited by: Greg Hess ]

[ZepSOFD]

Hey all,

 

I'm not really thinking about realtime rendering just looking for alternatives to DR or the current render farm setup. Plus I have a pile of P, PP, PII class machines that really would not offer any decent DR or RF performance in todays standards, but as a cluster they might have more ROI value, besides the knowledge and experience that I will gain from such an attempt.

 

It just seems to me that I remember a year or more back at the MAX forums there were some posts about running MAX on a Linux system. There were no performace gains only loss, but I would think that with a cluster any loss in overhead could be compensated for with additional hardware. I am assuming that MAX on Linux is running in an emulator/shell and that emulator/shell would be split into a parallel system this maybe a simplistic example, but I think it quickly shows my assumptions and ignorance.

 

Do you all have any comments to add to this other than about my ignorance of course.

 

Tom

[Wolf]

afaik beowulf clusters work in a linux environment,

and since max/viz is so tihtly integrated into windows....i doubt you will ever see it running on a beowulf.

 

if your interested in reading up on it...here is a huge lists of beowulf links

 

http://www.beowulf.org/

[Greg Hess]

Max will not run on linux due to the licensing system in place.

[ZepSOFD]

Thanks!

 

tom