[JoannaD]

Hello! This is my first post here.. I've been trying to find some information regarding render farms, but have not really found exactly what I'm looking for. My company wants to open an animation studio in India, and we are looking into the option of having a dedicated renderfarm in our office, but I'm not exactly sure where to look or what we need exactly.

To start off, we have 73 i7-950's (3Ghz) all with 6GB of DDR3 RAM, and about 6 of them have the nVidia Quadro 2000 1GB DDR5 graphics card, the rest have nVidia Quadro FX 600 and a few have Quadro FX 380 cards. I know that we can use these for rendering at night, or generally when they are not being used, but we need a render farm as well so people don't waste their time waiting for the render etc... but I have no idea how to approach this issue.. we can dedicate a space of about 1.5 m x 4.3 m to the render farm (do we need more?) and of course we will need to provide proper cooling methods etc.. can someone help please?

At this stage, we need 30 minutes of Standard Def rendered final output per month, but we have a feature film project coming up which will demand higher def output in a short period of time (about 5-6 months). Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[arttorney]

I always get a big kick out of this guy.
http://helmer.sfe.se/

There are a couple of other "how to" outside links at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for "Render Farm" that you may also be interested in.

This sounds like you have a lot riding on it. If I had a lot riding on it and a budget adequate to the task, I would probably contact Redhat. They got their act together and will provide tech support for a fee. You won't get tech support if you cobble something together in house like the guy in the link.

[JoannaD]

Hi! Thanks a lot for your reply, we do want to contact professional companies.. we're not looking to have a DYI render farm, but I need to understand the structure, and roughly what I would need, for example, I've read about blades.. what are those? How many nodes do we need? How many processors will be included? How much productivity will that give me.. etc... I'm very much a noob when it comes to render farms.. and everyone's counting on me to explain it to them! heheh!
I've already contacted BOXX for a quotation, but haven't really gotten anywhere so far, and I'd like to understand the structure and how it works so that I don't get punk'd by these companies (you know like they'd recommend something that would cost more and would give me way more than I need just so they can gain money).. Help! hehe!

[arttorney]

OK. If you start a dialog with those guys at www.redhat.com about what you want to do, and start getting some quotes, you might be able to back check what those guys are telling you by making polite inquiries at http://www.fedoraforum.org/ (because Fedora linux is the open source brother to the commercial enterprise known as the Redhat Enterprise Server). The guys on the Fedora forums will expect that you have done your homework, such as searching the forums for similar questions already asked and answered before you just start blurting out questions. Most of those guys on there are working systems administrators with a solid knowledge of the Fedora (redhat related) family of Linux.

I can provide you with a link to a website by a physics professor about Beowulf style linux clusters that has a bunch of rather technical formula-type discussions concerning what computing capacity you can get for how many nodes, how fast the processors are etc. but I don't want to freak you out with that higher level stuff if you don't figure you are ready for it yet. Well anyway, here is that guy: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Beowulf...ook/index.html

In general, from what I've seen while nosing around, people are getting some pretty good results from clusters that have about 4-5 reasonable computers networked. You won't need a giant cluster like 90 nodes unless you are trying to calculate the orbits in the asteroid belt, etc.

[JoannaD]

Thank you so much! I'm really grateful for all this info you've provided me with.. I'll make the inquiries and see what happens..

[arttorney]

Good luck Joanna. It sounds like a fun project even though it might be daunting.

[pawan123]

Happy to be here ...

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Just then a voice called from outside the door, "If you do, I won't go."

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