The "I have more buckets than you" Challenge

[Jeff Mottle]

Yesterday I got an email from a friend who had CGarchitect combine a few of their V-Ray licenses onto one dongle. They have 312 buckets over 17 computers so I asked them to send me a screenshot to actually see this. Below are those screenshots. That got me thinking. I wonder if anyone can beat this. If you have more buckets post your screenshots below.

 

[Francisco Penaloza]

ha ha ha ha that awesome

[jcaddy]

When there is nothing pressing in our farm, I will give it a go and see how many we can get.

[Tommy L]

I am extremely envious. Most I can manage is 72. I have 9 x i7's.

Edited May 15, 2013 by Tommy L

[cg_Butler]

It looks like they've got some slow machines included in that looking at those buckets! Very cool........There's a new T-shirt design right there for all of us. Like the "Everything's got Fresnel" T-shirts, it could read "How many buckets do you have?" I shall copyright that now if anyone wants to use it!! Or indeed, "I've got more buckets than you!" :-)

Edited May 15, 2013 by cg_Butler

[Mario De Achadinha]

haha this is brilliant - we have 20 x i7 extremes 12cores = 240 buckets, what the hell is running to get 312 buckets??

[Brodie Geers]

I'm the friend Jeff is referring to above. Mario, we've got all dual xeon machines (workstations and render farm alike) so we get either 16 or 24 buckets per machine.

 

-Brodie

[Tommy L]

Woah, hang on. You said 'we'. I think a competition like this should be 'number of buckets per user', not total on network. How many staff sharing those puppies?

[Brodie Geers]

Haha, I'll leave the challenge rules up to Jeff

 

This particular farm is shared by 5 people.

 

-Brodie

[Jeff Mottle]

Haha, rules are total buckets that "could" be available to one user. If that is 300 machines on a network or on one machine. Does not matter.

[Tommy L]

When there is nothing pressing in our farm, I will give it a go and see how many we can get.

You can check the thread count in Backburner I believe.

[Mario De Achadinha]

Haha, now this is becoming a boys & their toys comp... Will have to steal some of our designers processing power in the morning:) Brodie respect for those xeons!!

[Ernest Burden III]

My friend and partner in a rendering business uses Mac, but we're both rendering with C4D/vray. On PC, an 8 core yields 8 vray buckets, but his 12 core Macs yield 24 buckets. No fair! And they're fast as hell.

 

Oh, and with C4D, you do not need a dongle for your vray license, it's a keycode file. Much easier.

 

I remember being at Siggraph a bunch of years ago and found Nils from NeoScape at the Boxx booth rocking a dozen or two vray buckets. It was very impressive and Nils couldn't stop smiling.

[Chris MacDonald]

My friend and partner in a rendering business uses Mac, but we're both rendering with C4D/vray. On PC, an 8 core yields 8 vray buckets, but his 12 core Macs yield 24 buckets. No fair! And they're fast as hell.

 

Pretty sure that's down to hyperthreading, nothing more.

[cg_Butler]

My friend and partner in a rendering business uses Mac, but we're both rendering with C4D/vray. On PC, an 8 core yields 8 vray buckets, but his 12 core Macs yield 24 buckets. No fair! And they're fast as hell.

 

Oh, and with C4D, you do not need a dongle for your vray license, it's a keycode file. Much easier.

 

I remember being at Siggraph a bunch of years ago and found Nils from NeoScape at the Boxx booth rocking a dozen or two vray buckets. It was very impressive and Nils couldn't stop smiling.

 

 

Are your cores not multithreaded? That would double your buckets!

[Ernest Burden III]

The docs for vray say to set the threads to the number of cores, so I do. Beyond that, I don't know. I wounder if telling it to make two buckets for one core is going to provide any benefit to one per. In the end it is one core doing one job.

[Tommy L]

The docs for vray say to set the threads to the number of cores, so I do. Beyond that, I don't know. I wounder if telling it to make two buckets for one core is going to provide any benefit to one per. In the end it is one core doing one job.

No, Ernest, no! You've been under-bucketing all this time...

Hyperthreading makes each core into two threads. They will indeed render twice as fast This is one of the few occasions that you will actually be getting something for nothing.

[Brodie Geers]

I think it's just a terminology thing. I think AMD makes an actual 8 core processor but I don't believe Intel does so it's pretty uncommon.

 

Earnest, you've probably got a CPU with 4 physical cores which are hyperthreaded, effectively splitting each core into two. Most programs (including Windows Task Manager will display this as an 8 core machine). So you'd have 4 physical cores but 8 virtual cores (and thus 8 buckets). It sounds like your friend probably has dual Xeon processors which are each 6 physical cores (12 virtual).

 

-Brodie

[Chris MacDonald]

I think it's just a terminology thing. I think AMD makes an actual 8 core processor but I don't believe Intel does so it's pretty uncommon.

 

Intel make 8 core xeons.

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/

[Brodie Geers]

Intel make 8 core xeons.

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/

 

Ah, hadn't seen those. You're URL showed up in my "reply with quote" but not in the post so I'll repost it here...

 

http://ark.intel.com/products/64596/

 

It looks like it has a brother as well.

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117272

 

In light of that I'll humbly redact my statement about Intel not making 8 core cpu's. However, given that these both seem to be server processors costing about $2000, I'll maintain that 8 core processors are still pretty rare

 

-Brodie

[Ernest Burden III]

Well, the machine I'm talking about has two of these:

Intel Xeon E5345

Cores 4

Threads 4

Name Intel Xeon E5345

Code Name Clovertown

Specification Intel® Xeon® CPU E5345 @ 2.33GHz

 

So eight. Eight buckets. My friend has 24 per machine. As said, no fair. Stupid Mac.

[Scott Dombrowski]

Let's see... Between my workstation and my two dedicated render nodes, I have 36 physical cores, 72 hyperthreaded. When I saw the title of this thread, I thought I had a decent chance to at least be in the running. Then I read the first post with Jeff's friend running 312 cores, and I realized I needed to step it up a notch.

 

I asked our CADD manager roughly how many workstations had Max deployed as part of our CADD package and she said "all of them". I use mental ray, so with DBR I am limited to 4 external render nodes. The workaround is to use a combination of Backburner with DBR. So in theory, I could divide all of our office's workstations into groups of 5 (one Backburner server with 4 associated DBR nodes) and use Backburner with split scan lines turned on to get all those workstations cranking on one image. But how many cores would that be?

 

At the firm where I work, I see 87 workstations on my floor, not including the handful of laptops that the managers use. There are two other floors with a roughly equal density of workstations, plus probably another 40 on the first floor. Let's call it 300 total workstations. Most of them are Dell Optiplex 980, 990, or 9010s configured with quad core i5 processors. 300 workstations, 4 cores per workstation, that's 1200 cores. Just so my workstation and render nodes don't feel left out, let's call it 1272 cores. I got a little giddy typing that.

 

So, 1272 cores.

 

With Backburner and mental ray DBR, that'd be 60 split scan line strips with an average of 20 cores per strip.

 

But why stop there?

 

What if I tapped the workstations in our satellite offices? Based on the number of employees we have, I estimate that we have another 150 workstations capable of running Max. That's another 600 cores. Of course, the network overhead to this entire operation would be obscene, not to mention the time required to set up the Backburner / DBR groups of 5 and the extra power draw of running 450 workstations at 100% (I'm picturing the scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation where the guy at the power plant has to kick in the auxiliary power switch when Clark plugs in all of his Christmas lights). And all this rendering would have to be done at night or on the weekends when nobody else is using their workstations.

 

So theoretically, I could harness 1872 cores. Would it be practical? No way. But it's is pretty neat to think about.

[cg_Butler]

Do it Scott, do it!!

[Dimitris Tolios]

Well, the machine I'm talking about has two of these:

Intel Xeon E5345

Cores 4

Threads 4

Name Intel Xeon E5345

Code Name Clovertown

Specification Intel® Xeon® CPU E5345 @ 2.33GHz

 

So eight. Eight buckets. My friend has 24 per machine. As said, no fair. Stupid Mac.

 

Hmm, yeah, right...E5345...as in 2007 launced CPU with MSRP of ~$400 ea, vs. a 2011 CPU that MSRP ~ $1450 ea...Not exactly apples with apples here.

 

Actually all serious Mac users are pissed that PCs have been enjoying 8-core / 16 thread Xeons for 2 years now (i.e. 32 buckets), while Mac Pros have been stuck with 2011 tech...stupid macs or not, you could have upgraded for quite some time to a PC that beats your friends machine easily. It is cheaper than getting a 12C Mac Pro, still far from cheap

[alias_marks]

Let's see... Between my workstation and my two dedicated render nodes, I have 36 physical cores, 72 hyperthreaded. When I saw the title of this thread, I thought I had a decent chance to at least be in the running. Then I read the first post with Jeff's friend running 312 cores, and I realized I needed to step it up a notch.

 

I asked our CADD manager roughly how many workstations had Max deployed as part of our CADD package and she said "all of them". I use mental ray, so with DBR I am limited to 4 external render nodes. The workaround is to use a combination of Backburner with DBR. So in theory, I could divide all of our office's workstations into groups of 5 (one Backburner server with 4 associated DBR nodes) and use Backburner with split scan lines turned on to get all those workstations cranking on one image. But how many cores would that be?

 

At the firm where I work, I see 87 workstations on my floor, not including the handful of laptops that the managers use. There are two other floors with a roughly equal density of workstations, plus probably another 40 on the first floor. Let's call it 300 total workstations. Most of them are Dell Optiplex 980, 990, or 9010s configured with quad core i5 processors. 300 workstations, 4 cores per workstation, that's 1200 cores. Just so my workstation and render nodes don't feel left out, let's call it 1272 cores. I got a little giddy typing that.

 

So, 1272 cores.

 

With Backburner and mental ray DBR, that'd be 60 split scan line strips with an average of 20 cores per strip.

 

But why stop there?

 

What if I tapped the workstations in our satellite offices? Based on the number of employees we have, I estimate that we have another 150 workstations capable of running Max. That's another 600 cores. Of course, the network overhead to this entire operation would be obscene, not to mention the time required to set up the Backburner / DBR groups of 5 and the extra power draw of running 450 workstations at 100% (I'm picturing the scene in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation where the guy at the power plant has to kick in the auxiliary power switch when Clark plugs in all of his Christmas lights). And all this rendering would have to be done at night or on the weekends when nobody else is using their workstations.

 

So theoretically, I could harness 1872 cores. Would it be practical? No way. But it's is pretty neat to think about.

 

Did I hear a niner in there? I thought I did but I'm not sure.. are you calling from a wawkie tawkie? jokes..

 

Joking aside, enjoying the geek out session here. Very fun to follow this thread..

 

 

Do it Scott, do it!!

 

quoted for agreement

Edited May 18, 2013 by alias_marks