I think if you put it on paper, there is no one solution that outdoes all the others.
few fast nodes VS more slower ones – both have their pros and cons. space and powerconsumption, server room cooling, UPS’es, ease of maintenance, software licensing are all factors. do you favor getting frames as fast as possible to artists, or do you look at overall performance for all rendering tasks combined? do you have different strategies for daytime and nighttime? Not just: workstations become slaves outside of office hours, but things like scheduling certain types of jobs for overnight, favoring stills rendering during the day VS sequence rendering during the night. do you have short turnaround jobs with huge demands at peak times, or do you have long term projects that you can carefully plan and predict? its an infinitely complex problem, and that’s not even counting the cost factor. money saved on one side can cause more money to be spent elsewhere – it’s all too easy to look at the cost of renderslaves per node or per CPU and forget all related costs for storage, server, network, modifications you need to make to the server room. At which point your ridiculously expensive blades all of a sudden become very attractive. From: Mirko Jankovic Sent: Tuesday, July 31, 2012 5:25 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Renderfarm options yes licences are also big thing to deal with more "slower" render comps or less stronger ones. But then again, brand name render nodes are pretty expensive and I wondering if you put on paper everything, configurations and licences in both cases what number will you get :)
