Setting up a low cost Render Farm using old CPU

[pradipta]

I want to know is it really possible to hook up some dozen of old PII or PIII CPU to make a low cost render farm?

 

I am refering to the artcile that I saw in extremeTech where author Matthew Tait describe creating you own render farm. Here is the article http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,1815797,00.asp

 

It's quite an interesting article. But, the staistical data that he has provided is really astonishing. I would like to know the technicallity of setting up such a farm where several CPU are connected to a main server as array.

[anvaraziz]

100% sure , u can.........

[dbarc]

Pretty sure it can be done and it seems like it could be worthwhile for distributed rendering - ie throwing all the processing power into rendering one frame. For standard network rendering the advantage of having archaic cpus attached is often not so clear. The newer nodes end up sitting around doing nothing waiting for the older ones to painfully slowly finish their frames.

 

When we set up our render farm we thought we would be continually adding to it but it has actually been more a case of replacing the older nodes as the differential in speed between new and old dragged down the overall efficiency..

 

I imagine it won't be long before we start to see distributed rendering and network rendering combined to give you the advantages of both - If so we'll probably dust off the older computers and hook them back up.

[dbarc]

one thing you would need to establish if you're going for pretty old cpus is whether there are any compatilbility issues with current versions of your OS, rendering software etc..

[thinice]

Technically, it shouldn't be much of a problem.

 

On the other hand, it really depend on your situation on whether it is worthwhile. If you are running Windows and after factoring in the necessary upgrades, power consumption etc, you could be better off just getting new gear.

 

Eg: my new x2 machine costs about the same as my 1999 P3 450, but render about 10 times faster ( on Lightwave), and my old machine only got 256Mb RAM - which means I need to upgrade the RAM if I want to render my current scenes.

 

Just my 2 cents

[pradipta]

thanks a lot for all the comments. i will work on it now and will let you all know about that. what i feel is it's a challenge to get the power out of older CPUs and put them into work. i will try to get fewer mid range CPUs and hope this will serve th eprupose for me now.

 

again, thanks for all the comments,