We are upgrading our render farm, but dont know where to start.

[acjwalker]

CUrrently we are looking into upgrading our render farm. Our animations are taking a long time to render and we need to upgrade. We brought most of our render farm nearlly three years ago and it doesnt seem to keep up.

 

At the moment we have a render farm of 7 serperate machines.

 

6 are 4 GB, with Intel Xeon e5320 1.86 GHZ

 

and 1 is

 

4 GB 2 x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5 GHZ

 

They are all runnning Windows XP x64.

 

We render with 3DS Max 2010 and Vray.

 

Now the 1 computer which has two quad cores is what we rely on it do our irradiance map and Light cache pass as the others cannot handle it (well can but take too long.) As you can imagine the good machine renders nearlly 3 frames to the other machines one on occasions.

 

We are doing bigger sites and more trees etc and are really struggling.

 

We are looking into blade servers but just wondering what people recommend to put inside them.

 

Any advice would be much apreciated.

[ihabkal]

Hi there,

I won't go into details but I will give you some pointers:

energy saving, get something powerful but not too powerfull so that your electricity bill won't ruin your budget,

Get something with 16GB ram, 8 is not enough anymore I am having problems with 8

I recommend if you have a big budget Dual quad core machines based on the latest architecture, if low budget, i7s with 12GB ram. But don't get the most expensive cpu it will cost too much with barely no actual benefit. ge the one lower or the second lower one ( the 2.8GHz i7 model is very good)

[acjwalker]

cheers I will defo take in how much ram we need and what processors, As eevryone would you would love dual quads but its all a thing about cost!

 

Though could wait a few months for amd or intel to release thier 6 core processors! (I WISH)

[RenderStream]

Hello,

We published an article on this subject to help those in your situation. We ran a cost analysis on several different high computation farm configurations. We took into account equipment costs, infrastructure costs, power consumption and cooling costs over three years. We realize there may be other contributing factors like equipment depreciation but for comparison’s sake, we will not get into those factors. We used our render server product line for these examples but the concepts are universal and would apply to any similarly configured systems.

 

It seems I don't have emough posts with my new username to paste links. You can go to blog dot renderstream dot com and its the 3rd one down from the top called "Costs associated with high computation renderfarms"

 

Hope that helps.

 

-joe

[easy3dsource]

I was just reading the blog post you mentioned, and can't get over the hilarity of your naming of option 3 and option 4; ridiculous / ludicrous speeds...

 

That's a great homage to one of my all-time favorite movies, haha. If you can throw in some spaceballs moichendice I might just have to buy a server from you.

[RenderStream]

We'll try and throw in a lunch box for you But just this once.

 

-joe

[ihabkal]

I was just reading the blog post you mentioned, and can't get over the hilarity of your naming of option 3 and option 4; ridiculous / ludicrous speeds...

 

That's a great homage to one of my all-time favorite movies, haha. If you can throw in some spaceballs moichendice I might just have to buy a server from you.

 

I knew I heard that somewhere "Space Balls", a hilarious comedy making fun of Star Wars. The comic relief was a so called human dog! (replacing Chubaka)

 

Anyway the article is great, but a more simplified conclusion would help. it has so many numbers.

[acjwalker]

Cheers for the "link" But you were too slow, I had already printed it out and passed it on to our IT guy.

[AJLynn]

I'm very glad Joe's gone and put together that report, it addresses a point I've been making but never had the numbers to back up. One more factor, for the example on that blog: consider that with Option 1 (the lowest cost hardware) in addition to losing money on power and air conditioning, it requires 245 U's of space to equal what a blade solution does in 7 U's. That's five full-height racks, e.g., an entire server room as opposed to a spot in your data server rack, at commercial real estate prices.

[RenderStream]

very good point. i didn't consider the cost of the room as it was a consistent factor in all the scenarios. but you are certainly right. if you don't have extra space already that's definitely something to consider.

 

-joe

Edited February 2, 2010 by RenderStream

[acjwalker]

Ok guys here is a question. This is what we have lloked at maybe getting:

 

Basic Spec:

 

Dell Precision Desktop T1500

 

Intel Core i7-870 (2.93ghz)

8Gb Ram

Windows 7 6x Pro

 

Now the question is, speed wise is it more sensible to get say two of these machines

 

or

make them Dual Quads (2 x i7-870).

 

e.g.

 

8 machines with single Quads and 8GB Ram

 

or

 

4 Machines with Dual Quads and (maybe 16gb Ram) But for this lets say 8GB

[acjwalker]

Ok think got the machines sorted, now dos anyone user a render manager apart from backburner which they could recomend?!?!?

[Matt Sugden]

I currently run 7 machines, and I'm thinking of upgrading 4 of them. The quads are great, I think they are Q6600s, but the duals are just useless these days, taking sometimes almost an hour per frame, compared to about 10 mins for the quads.

 

Something I've noticed is that I'd like to get a smaller package, as currently I have to sit next to a 7 foot server cabinet full of pcs whirring away, but I can't find much on dual chip motherboards (as in 2 processors), as well as knowing what cheap server cases I could put these in.

 

I was also looking at the blade, stuff but are they mega bucks?

[AJLynn]

Well, the rack mount (or blades, which usually ens up using a rack in some capacity but fit more than one motherboard per 1U) is still the most space-efficient way to go. Dual socket motherboards aren't hard to find, but they use Xeon series CPUs instead of Core series. (They're really the same thing, but they have multi socket enabled and cost more.) There are a few companies making systems that cram two dual socket motherboards into one smallish case to go in a rack, and market them to render farm users. Aside from racks and blades you're stuck with PC cases, which use more space when you needs several of them.

[Matt Sugden]

So are all dual socket boards for xeon procs? and if so what's the most cost effective (meaning cheapest) combo of chip mobo getting 8 procs?

 

I cant seem to find much info on dual socket mobos at all??

[John.RenderStream]

So are all dual socket boards for xeon procs? and if so what's the most cost effective (meaning cheapest) combo of chip mobo getting 8 procs?

 

I cant seem to find much info on dual socket mobos at all??

 

Motherboards: Dual processor boards for the newest Intel Xeon 5500-series have the 5520 and the 5500 chipset. The 5520 chipset has two PCI-e slots versus one slot for the 5500 chipset but both support dual quad-cores with the LGA 1366 socket.

 

For the Xeon series-5500 Nehalem-based processors the most cost-effective is the 2.26 GHz E5520 which is the slowest of the family that has four physical cores and eight logical cores. The fastest processor in the family is the 3.2 GHz W5580 but it will not work in the multiple server enclosures because it exceeds the power requirements of these densely packed servers.

 

FYI We offer twin and quad-render servers that respectively have two dual quad computers and four dual quad system configurations with processors up to 2.93 GHz that are 1U high for each pair of computers laid side-by-side in one enclosure. These are our Ridiculous Speed render farms. We also offer ten and fourteen dual quad blades that we call Ludicrous Speed render farm. This latter is a complete farm with built in switch and KVM-over-LAN and fits in a 7U enclosure.

 

Based on our Maya w/mental ray benchmarks our dual quad 2.26 GHz runs in 4 minutes 42 seconds and the 2.67 GHz runs in 4 minutes. Compared to a single 2.67 GHz i7-920 that runs the same benchmark in 8 minutes and 21 seconds and a single 2.67 GHz Xeon X5550 that runs it in 8.00 minutes. 3DSMax benchmarks are different in speed but share near identical relative speeds.

 

Hope this helps.

 

John

Edited February 19, 2010 by John.RenderStream
Added more information

[adarsh]

Hardware : Blade or Workstations

Processor : Xeons for blades and i7 extreme for Desktops

RAM: Atleast 2GB or more per core of the CPU

HDD: Depending on the write speed 7200rpm at the least

Graphics card: GPU based (not necessarily needed)

Switch/Router/Networking: 1Gig for small, 10Gig for higher

 

Recommended systems:

1) Boxx Technologies

2) Dell PowerEdge M910

3) HP ProLiant DL165 G7 Server

4) Mac Pro (Boot Camp) - do not buy now, but plan it when they are release with new processors Xeons (12 cores).

 

Thank you,

Adarsh

 

 

CUrrently we are looking into upgrading our render farm. Our animations are taking a long time to render and we need to upgrade. We brought most of our render farm nearlly three years ago and it doesnt seem to keep up.

 

At the moment we have a render farm of 7 serperate machines.

 

6 are 4 GB, with Intel Xeon e5320 1.86 GHZ

 

and 1 is

 

4 GB 2 x Intel Xeon E5420 2.5 GHZ

 

They are all runnning Windows XP x64.

 

We render with 3DS Max 2010 and Vray.

 

Now the 1 computer which has two quad cores is what we rely on it do our irradiance map and Light cache pass as the others cannot handle it (well can but take too long.) As you can imagine the good machine renders nearlly 3 frames to the other machines one on occasions.

 

We are doing bigger sites and more trees etc and are really struggling.

 

We are looking into blade servers but just wondering what people recommend to put inside them.

 

Any advice would be much apreciated.