Re: Renderfarm options

[Sylvain Lebeau]

cool to have another chime! When i say old blades... it doesnt mean they are old x486... ;-)  they are also Dell Poweredge Xeon servers with 6 gig ram. Here we mostly do beauty renders in Arnold with AOV's and a couple of puzz matte.  And renders that takes 1h on our best blades can take up to 3-4 hours on older ones.  So it's better for us to keep the power on these tasks so we get the passes as fast as possible. It is very rare that a nuke comp takes more then 5 minutes per frame.  We also use deadline and i've never tried the concurrent task thing. I will look into it. thanks for pointing this out.. What's is your gain by using it in % of speed increase? As for network I/O, we have a system called shed_latest_3d that copies the latest 3d renders to the comp server. This way, nuke comps always source the same sequence and we dont need to relink them and it also makes the load on the servers/switches better balanced. will try the concurrent task thing! sly -- Sylvain Lebeau // SHED V-P/Visual effects supervisor 1410, RUE STANLEY, 11E ÉTAGE MONTRÉAL (QUÉBEC) H3A 1P8 T 514 849-1555 F 514 849-5025 WWW.SHEDMTL.COM <http://WWW.SHEDMTL.COM>   pete...@skynet.be Tuesday, July 31, 2012 6:16 AM Sylvain wrote:   >> 35 blades total with 14 dedicated to nuke (old ones that doesnt have enough ram and power for arnold)   >> recycle your old blade for comp! ...    just jumping in I am surprised about this – as we do the exact opposite. we prioritize the best renderblades for Nuke, most with 24Gb ram, some more – and about any old blade will do for 3D rendering. (10-12Gb is plenty)   the logic is that -during working hours- the rendered composite is what artists are actually waiting for  to move their work forward – while 3D sequence rendering can usually plough on in the background. We’ve verified the 3D render on a few stills (that can even be rendered local if the artist so chooses) so we don’t really lose time waiting on the full sequence.   we’re using Deadline, and something we really push with Nuke rendering is “concurrent tasks” – so each blade is rendering several frames at once – at which point having a lot of ram is crucial. This reduces total task time almost linearly – eg 4 tasks at once means the total render of a sequence will be almost 4 times faster. Another factor is that nuke rendering puts more load on the network – so we rather have a small amount of very performant blades for that, and a large amount of less performant ones for 3D rendering. Something which no doubt comes into play too, is that we are not doing beauty rendering – so we have a lot of discreet passes, none of them very slow to render – in return, our comps are more demanding, with the simplest of shots having 30 odd passes.   So yeah, best blades for compositing here all the way.   As for Leoung’s original question – for 3D rendering, you can never have enough cores – assuming your renderer uses them well (which mr mostly does) – so I’d be tempted by the 32 cores. That’s double the 16 cores – it’s bound to make a real difference. Only downside is that for those tasks that aren’t multithreaded you have a lot of cores idling. Wouldn’t it be cool if they designed these muticore machines with one “master” core, that would have very high clock speed, and a lot of “slave” cores that kick in for multithreading? Fast pre-render + fast render = .   just my 0.02 eurocent. Sylvain Lebeau Monday, July 30, 2012 11:37 PM ok! recycle your old blade for comp! ...  or for ethernet gagming!! ....Quake 2 arena is massivly comming back here....  ;-) and no i didnt compare....   i buy new shits and hope for the best upon the specs i get.. !! yeah boxx are very expensive and ... maybe overated... in my humble opinion. Maybe others could chip in to tell us... i would be very open to hear experiences with those boxxes... sly Leoung O'Young Monday, July 30, 2012 11:30 PM We render in old Mental Ray. We do have a few systems with not enough ram collecting dust . Have you compare a single intel i7 3930 (6 cores, 12 thread) with 2x Xeon X5650 I spoke to Boxx about their Renderpro 2x Xeon E5 2670 16 cores 32 thread but it comes with a price On 7/30/2012 11:01 PM, Sylvain Lebeau wrote: Sylvain Lebeau Monday, July 30, 2012 11:01 PM Hey no problem!! We only have Dell Poweredge servers in the farm.  35 blades total with 14 dedicated to nuke (old ones that doesnt have enough ram and power for arnold) ...  The other ones + the artists workstations are dedicated to 3D.... Our latest machines (15 wich we named Ultras) are Xeon X5650 with 2 physical mutli-threaded processors for a total of 24 threads. Each 16 gigs of ram. They are rock solid!!!!  We render everything in Arnold here and they are very performant.. Glad you've never had any problems.... i've recently read that in the Arnold or XSI list a couple weeks ago....  Maybe it is related to how your render engine is programmed too?... i dont know much about instruction sets like i've said...   Are you Arnold based?. or Mental Ray?  Just curious.. as you can see, my farm is not doing much right now ;-)  wich is pretty temporary... Because with the load of work heading among us.... i may need 5-10 more blades soon enough.... dam it!!!  sly Leoung O'Young Monday, July 30, 2012 10:37 PM Hi Sly, Thanks so much for quick responds. I had a mix of AMD Opteron and Intel Xeon previously with no problem, but that doesn't mean it won't be a problem now. Did you guys build your own computers for the farm or bought them off the shelf, are they dual processor systems? Thanks, Leoung On 7/30/2012 10:02 PM, Sylvain Lebeau wrote: