Render farm in a box

[Roger]

I'm not anywhere near being ready for final rendering for my movie, but have been thinking about building a custom render box when that time comes. I'm not sure if I'd be better off going with many slower cores or fewer really fast cores.

 

The 2 options I'm looking at are Intel Xeon 8 core processors and AMD 12 core Interlagos processors.

 

For $1500 I can get either one 8 core Xeon server processor, or 2 12 core interlagos processors, a motherboard and 64gb of ECC memory. I would be looking at about $2500 for a xeon, motherboad and RAM.

 

I've looked at the benchmarks for both CPUs and the Xeon is anywhere from 60 to 100 percent faster than the Interlagos chip.

So, I imagine an 8 core Xeon would be about as fast as a 12 or 16 core Interlagos.

 

I can't afford to go with 2 Xeons, I'd be looking at a $5000 system in no time. Would be nice to have 16 cores and 32 threads, but probably overkill.

 

My thinking is even though the Xeon spanks the Interlagos in the benchmarks, I can afford more cores if I go Interlagos, to the point that it may negate the difference. But I need to get the dual Interlagos system, for the full 24 cores.

 

Anyone out there have a system with this many CPUs or work with one? Any thoughts about using AM on something like this?

I'm not ready to get this type of box just yet, I'm just thinking ahead a bit ( a lot?). My plan is to render out my film at 720p or 1080p resolution, I have 2 4 core systems that are pretty fast, but I'm sure one of them would be occupied for weeks. I guess I'm not going to know if it will be something I really need until I'm doing some tests.

[thejobe]

a while ago yes.

a friend of mine (a computer hardware god) built a 256 core machine. it was about 7 feet tall and about 10 feet wide, 6 feet deep.

these processors were old (only 1GHZ) the thing ran for about 2 days and got a very impressive bench mark of about 2 mins a frame at 1080p rez per frame. so every min we rendered 128 frames.

so with that at 24 frames per sec. and doing a 10 min short (14,400 frames) it would take you 2 hours and 27 mins to render the whole thing

after the second day the machine overheated from lack of proper cooling (we needed a freezer really to run it correctly)

the machine cost about $22,000 from what he was telling me with all the part but the software was custom.

 

the only thing you would have a problem with is cooling. this stuff gets hot.. really hot. so buy a A/C unit just for the thing and keep it at 55.

[Roger]

a while ago yes.

a friend of mine (a computer hardware god) built a 256 core machine. it was about 7 feet tall and about 10 feet wide, 6 feet deep.

these processors were old (only 1GHZ) the thing ran for about 2 days and got a very impressive bench mark of about 2 mins a frame at 1080p rez per frame. so every min we rendered 128 frames.

so with that at 24 frames per sec. and doing a 10 min short (14,400 frames) it would take you 2 hours and 27 mins to render the whole thing

after the second day the machine overheated from lack of proper cooling (we needed a freezer really to run it correctly)

the machine cost about $22,000 from what he was telling me with all the part but the software was custom.

 

the only thing you would have a problem with is cooling. this stuff gets hot.. really hot. so buy a A/C unit just for the thing and keep it at 55.

 

So, just on a straight core comparison, since I have about 1/10 the cores (faster cores also) I could be looking at 10 hours to 20 hours for the same job. For about $1500, that doesn't sound too bad. If I were going to do this, I would probably attempt to overclock them and use some sort of watercooling. Of course, I may not need to render it that quickly, so maybe I'm better off just using my one box for rendering and then continuing to work on my other system. Ultimately, even if it took 3 days to a week it would probably still be quick enough for my purposes.

[Fuchur]

I'd say that a Xeon will not be 100% faster as an AMD Interlago in this circumstances... for A:M it will be much less than 100% (since A:M is more about float and not about integer-calculations... and rendering is "multithreaded" (actually it uses one processor for each frame, so technically spoken it may not be the right term).

 

Anyway: I have not worked with a AMD processor with that many cores in one computer but with several 6-cores in a network.

(I think I got something like 32 cores running with that. Keep in mind that you will need to buy additional rendernodes.

Find instructions here: Info about Additional Rendernodes

Find pricing here: Pricing

 

See you

*Fuchur*

[Shelton]

All my machines are liquid cooled that have more than 4 cores. Gerald is correct these things got hot! Some of my issues when rendering for rear window was my 8 core machines got too hot and some cores shut down

 

Steve

[robcat2075]

I'm not anywhere near being ready for final rendering for my movie, but...

 

The good news is that whenever you get to that point, the options will be different again. Probably cheaper and faster.

[pixelplucker]

Do you really need the number crunching power of a xeon for rendering? I would think innexpensive fast cores would perform better if it just a render server.

[Roger]

Do you really need the number crunching power of a xeon for rendering? I would think innexpensive fast cores would perform better if it just a render server.

 

Probably not. I think I would be able to offset the difference with more, slower Interlagos cores. Of course, by the time I am ready for final render, AMD may not be in business any more. Their stock price is under $2 a share now.

[pixelplucker]

I think they will be around for a long time. Not many companies have the loyal following as they do. Not sure why Hash would be a publically traded company anyways.

 

Most large corporations need to have >200 top executives that siphon 98% of the revenues and when they put the company into bankruptcy they then need to cut worker wages and have the tax payers pick up the tab on the pensions through the gov garantee while they take more money in bonuses. Then get a loan based on any intelectual value of the company and give themselves more bonuses for the idea of getting a loan. Isn't that how big companies are supposed to be run?

 

I thought I saw someone on the forums that offered to render out for others who has a render far,, forgot who it was.

[Roger]

Was it MMZTimelord, maybe? Or maybe it was Largento? I think it was one of them.

[MMZ_TimeLord]

Yes, it was me. Not really a farm yet, but all six of my Phenom II X6 cores are available with a bunch of RAM as well as my old laptop (P4 3.4 Ghz - Hyper threaded).

 

I have 10 extra node licenses and am working on fresh installs for three other machines to add to the farm (another P4 and a Core 2 Duo).

 

If you need assistance and have scenes with minimal textures I can help. I suggest minimal textures to keep the upload size to me small. I can do GMail too so 25 megabytes is not out of the question (zipped helps too)

 

Let me know.

[Roger]

Thank you for the offer, I may take you up on that. At the rate I'm going, though, I may be able to render it in 1080p on a cellphone by the time I finish.