Teaching People to Dream
Render Farming
For discussion:
There are a number of render queue managers out there. Many of them are cross platform and fairly easy to use.
It would be cool if we could come up with a bootable CD-R or Thumb Drive that loads a light weight Linux distribution, along with network support, a queue client, and the most recent version of Blender. The idea is that you could create instant render farms from gangs of networked computers.
Here's a queue manager that might work (there are others that might work just as well or better):
http://loki-render.berlios.de/
What are your thoughts?
There are a number of render queue managers out there. Many of them are cross platform and fairly easy to use.
It would be cool if we could come up with a bootable CD-R or Thumb Drive that loads a light weight Linux distribution, along with network support, a queue client, and the most recent version of Blender. The idea is that you could create instant render farms from gangs of networked computers.
Here's a queue manager that might work (there are others that might work just as well or better):
http://loki-render.berlios.de/
What are your thoughts?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Andy Dolph on -
I'm just beginning to explore this issue, what are the other rendering managers that you are aware of? I'm trying to find something that will coexist with our existing network environment so that lab machines can be used for render farming at night.
Thanks..
andy
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Permalink Reply by Ron Proctor on -
There's DrQueue and Loki off the top of my head -- a web search can find others.
We use Sun Gridengine at our place because our server also runs science jobs.
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Permalink Reply by Andy Dolph on
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does the Sun Gridengine deal with distributing the frames to farm machines to be rendered?
Andy
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Permalink Reply by Ron Proctor on
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It's more of a framework for distributed computing. We divide the render batch into some number of jobs, then it sends a fixed amount of frames to each CPU. It works pretty good, but if you want to have better optimization you should go with a dedicated render queue manager.
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Permalink Reply by Rod_Kennedy on -
I looked at Dr Queue and it was worse than looking at computer programming. I wasn't sure which to download, and absolutely NO clear idea on how to install it on our render cluster OR how to make it work.
Xgrid doesn't seem to be much better, I can get the Xgrid server up and working but have no idea how to send it jobs. I guess the folks who help you design and set up a render farm aren't quite willing to let you have the secrets of farming without first paying your dues LOL.
Rod
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Permalink Reply by Andy Dolph on
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Loki is quite simple to setup. The only trick is that on a mac you need to put a symbolic link to the actual blender executable (inside the .app) in the path for it to find it....
Andy
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