Network Rendering Limit

[Scotters]

Hi,

 

Although I checked out the forum, I am interested in installing the network rendering option on some of the school computers. According to a sales guy we may have to buy more copies.

 

Is Max6 similar to Viz in that you can own 1 full copy but install the render module on an unlimited number of computers? Is there a difference if you are running educational licenses?

 

Are there huge demands on a network if 5 or more people are sending out renderings to possibly 40 computers? i.e. will we smoke the school network?

[abicalho]

HI there,

 

Yes, you can network render to as many computers you want with the scanline renderer and only 1 license with MAX 6. There's not a lot of network traffic, except when transfering the files to be rendered.

 

If you're rendering with mental ray, then each of the network machines will need a MAX license or mental ray licenses to be able to render.

 

I don't see a problem in 5 users sending to 40 computers, except for them fighting to see who'll get the render done first

 

Alexander

[Frosty]

Scott, I'm in Winnipeg. Feel free to email me.

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

more than likely you will have one comuter set up as the render farm server. you will have the server.exe running there, and the other 39 computers will be connected to that server (master) computer. it will deal out one job, and then the next, and so on. so server traffic shouldn't be to bad.

[tungsten2k]

sorry to bring a thread back from the dead, but this is directly relating to backburner rendering. . .

 

 

I have 25 rendering "servers" in a rendering farm and am having problems with units going "red" in Monitor due to unknown errors, requiring manual re-assignment of those units to available tasks. I can only expect that this is due to traffic issues because i don't see this problem with 10-15 machines. Is there a logfile specific to backburner "server" on each machine, or a way to put backburner into some verbose logging mode for debugging this problem ?

 

Here is my hardware setup:

 

25 x Rendering "servers":

-3.2GHz P4 (Intel D925 series motherboard)

-1GB RAM

-On-board Merit Gigabit Ethernet-

-Windows 2000 S-P4

-Quicktime 6.5.2

-Backburner Server 2.3 -(running as a service)

 

1 x Rendering "manager":

(same as rendering "servers" except no Backburner service, plus:

-Backburner Manager 2.3 (running as a service)

-Full Max7 Installation

-Backburner Monitor 2.3

 

1x File Server:

-1.6GHz P4 (Intel D845 series motherboard)

-1GB RAM

-3Com 3C1000 Gigabit PCI Ethernet (Broadcom chipset)

-3Ware 8508 RAID controller

-Linux Fedora Core 1 with latest RH Up2dates

-6x Western Digital WD2500 250GB SATA drives in RAID5 configuration using ReiserFS with NOTAIL option.

-Samba smbd sharing single 1.2TB volume with all memory optimizations in smb.conf

 

All machines connected via high-quality CAT6 cabling to 3 Netgear 10-port Gigabit switches.

 

I am flustered at what might be the problem. This seems like the ideal farm that shouldn't have any issues. When I fire off a render, while monitoring network output on the file server, I see sustained output on average of 25-35MB/sec for approximately 45secs while all the clients load their media, then hardly nothing... then some time thereafter, machines randomly show the errors.

 

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated ! Especially logfile locations and/or debuging and verbose logging options.

 

Thanks !

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

is there any more information on what the error message is?

 

....it could be they are timing out. if this is the case, increase the allowed time for each image. i keep mine at 800 minutes, i think the default is 60.

 

...does the login on the machine have permission, and the available path to save the file?

 

i really don't thnk it is your hardware setup. max seems to be good at ignoring network errors, unlike lightwave, which freaks on network errors.