3DS and Backburner - render farm

[jlevyarchitect]

I'm brand new to CGArchitect and we have 6 stations in our lab that are dedicated for a new render farm with backburner and 3DS 2009. These machines are 3 years old, have 2GB of RAM and 2 year old ATI FIRE GL cards.

 

Are these OK for starting out a render farm? I doubt our IT folks will give us anything new for another year. I think we can expand to 12 stations next fall.

 

thanks for your thoughts

[milfora]

Hi Jeff,

 

Sounds perfectly fine for starting out.

 

I've currently got a 40+ node render farm setup over here, with PC's ranging from low-end Admin's Dell Optiplex's (1GB) to higher-end T3400's modelling boxes with 3Gb Ram, and I find that every PC's contribution to be of substantial help when crunch time comes.

 

I've personally found that graphics cards on the render nodes is irrelevant, as I usually render with the VFB turned off to preserve memory. I'm more concerned with CPU and RAM - basically the more, the merrier.

 

AM

[amer abidi]

well when considering a render slave (i.e., a computer server dedicated only to rendering, not to be used as a workstation), the video card is of no concern. You rely solely on RAM and CPU power.

 

Our render farm slaves dont even have a video card, and they work wonders!

 

I guess the most important thing you'd have to ensure though is that they all share the same OS and config, as sometimes different OSs installed on different machines produce some undesirable variations in render output.

 

I'd say you invest in more RAM for these machines (doesnt cost much now), and look for 64bit architecture when you get your new ones next fall.

[jlevyarchitect]

:)Thanks greatly to both of you and your feedback. With us just starting out we want to make sure we work out any bugs prior to sinking big bucks into it.

 

JL