render farm

Gavin

I'm looking to build a render farm , around €15,000 budget.

Can anyone recommend irish places that sell dual cpu boards ? Komplett don't seem to stock any and I'm wary of buying from engerland when I know I'll probably have to return at least one of em.

Or if anyone has any other opinions on render farms, I'd be interested to head em

Gav

MunkyHed

would ya not buy a dell workstation? some of those machines have dual cpu.

Gavin

aye, I've priced a cheap dell server at 2,200 for dual 2.8 xeon with gig of ram.

Building em myself though would be a fair bit cheaper. If I can source a dual cpu board at a reasonable rate. Dell don't even offer dual Athlon MP machines.

Gav

deRanged

Did you price the Dell machines off the website or did you ring up a sales guy?
The website is usually way more expensive.

Is 1 GB RAM enough? I'd consider 1 GB the minimum per processor, but I don't know the profile of the work you'll be doing.

Raz

Click the following link to see a bunch of motherboards available at elare.ie. There are a lot of Dual Xeon processor boards on pages 2 and 3. There's no AMD boards though.

Elara.ie

Gavin

dRanged : I got the prices of the website, didn't think to call em. I'm not sure what sort of work exactly that's getting done, just that is 3d studio max. I'm just the sys admin guy. I'd assumed a gig of ram would be enough, I better go talk to our 3d guys.

Raz, thanks very much for that.
I put together this machine on elara. Harddrive and gfx card are simply the cheapest ones they have.

Xeon Foster/2.8GHz 512KB FSB400/1U

Asus PC-DL Deluxe, 875P Chipset, Dual Xeon 533/400, 4DDR(Dual channel) Memory 333/266 , IDE 100*2+133*1+SATA*4, RAID, AGP Pro/8X, LAN Gigabit INTEL CSA 82547, 5 PCI, ATX

Memory HyperX/1GB 434Mhz DDR CL2.5 2 xKit

Caviar Hard Disk Drive 40Gb EIDE 9.5ms 5400rpm - OEM

Radeon 7000 32mb AGP DDR + TV out + DVI

811i-350 Supermicro Chassis / 1U Rackmount Chassis / 2x Internal IDE / 350W XEON PSU


anyone see anything glaringly wrong with that ? Its ages since I've looked at buying new hardware. Total price comes to €1,590.28, substantially cheaper than dell !

Gav

davidclayton

these guys have a fair few of them

http://www.pchealth.ie/catalog/default.php

but all intel me thinks

Col_Loki

AMD MP boards are available here ......... www.computeruniverse.net (also the cheapest for Xeon solutions/opterons from what ive seen)

There very fast, excellent prices and reasonable delivery ( ~€20). They also have loads of dual Xeon boards but if your going down that road id advise holding off for a while as the new Xeons are comming out which is set to decrease current prices by quite a bit.

Are you thinking about linking up say 7 dual CPU systems? Thats quite a bit of processing power, the AMD MP's will prob work out half the price of Xeons .

What OS are you going to use?

[edit] PS the new Xeons have 800FSB, Begger cache, better branch prediction and other optimisations............. I dont think the PC-DL is compatible with them its a grey area last time i checked, the IWill DH800 is fully compatible but more costly.

Also you dont need 1U Xeons, there for the Racks.

Gavin

Twill be running Win 2000 pro most likely. 3d Studio max doesn't seem to take advantage of hyperthreading very well and in fact seems to perform better without according to reviews on toms hardware.

I'm swinging towards the elara setup at the moment. Buying off germany may be a bit of hassle, as I'm sure that given 16 or 18 cpu's at least one is going to go kaplooey fairly quickly.

I've got a 1u rack chassis in there., which will need the 1u cpu's I assume. I also assume that they come with heatsink/fan etc..

Gav

Col_Loki

Weigh up the price difference, it might save you over a grand which is pretty big (you could afford to just buy an extra CPU or two just incase ). I take it your going to use GB Lan?

How exactly are you going to take advantage of the other systems linked in, is studio max programed to take advantage of it or what? I know how the Linux clusters work but am not sure how your setup is going to work?

pchealth.ie seem to have a good selection of server boards so might be worth a look as david said.

From an upgrade point of view the opterons are prob the best as the current sockets are supposed to support the new dual core CPU's that are supposed to be comming out some time in '05. That should give a very big boost, almost the same as having 4 CPU's...........

Gavin

3d studio max has software for handling network rendering. Rendering lends itself very well to paralell processing as it splits up extremely easily. No need for gig lan as the nodes will not actually be talking to each other. The primary workstation simply sends out the components to each node and they work away. Almost totally cpu bound.

I'll mention the german option to the boss, see what he has to say. Thanks for the advice, keep it coming.

Gav

Col_Loki

Ahh thats something i didnt know. If its heavily CPU based, doesent require GB lan, , splits up easilym how heavily effected is it by FSB?

If FSB isint a big issue then the AMD MP option is almost definetly the best. The main area they fall down on is FSB but are very powerfull for Raw crunching etc. The fact that you could have almost double the ammount has to be an advantage or might be a cost cutting measure?

[edit] The main MP boards would be the Tyans, MSI K7D , and gigabyte have a model also. The Tyans require registered memory no matter what as far as im aware, but the MIS and im pretty sure the gigabyte also can take regular memory in the first two slots (also might save money)

Gavin

I'm not too certain on that. It uses a lot of ram, so I'm guessing that the FSB is the bus between ram and cpu, in which case the faster the better !

reviews from tomshardware suggest that intel seem to outperform amd on 3d studio max. Also we probably won't have the correct environment here as regards ventilation for the farm. Last I checked intel run much cooler than amd ? This still true ?

Must check and see if we have any rack cabinets knocking about actually.

Gav

Col_Loki

Intel actually tend to run hotter than AMD chips these days. The Xeons and MP's should be pretty simular (Xeons might be a little cooler but not much).

Heat is going to be an issue, dual CPU's generally mean almost double the heat. If space and heat is a big issue then mabye some well spec'd Xeons might be the best option. Have you checked out opterons at all BTW?

deRanged

Give Dell a ring and explain - I'm sure they'll be competitive.
(No I don't work for them but I do buy a fair bit of kit).

Have you looked at the cache sizes? They can make a big difference to computations.

Also check the power/aircon - xeons run hot.

What's the uptime requirement like?
i.e. do you need broken parts replaced asap or can you wait for shipping from Germany or whereever?

Would you be better off buying more PIV systems say - than going for the more expensive xeons?

These are the things we think about when we're buying. (We run a few clusters here)

Furp

I would also seriously reconsider using OEM 5400RPM Hard Drives, use at lease a 7200RPM hard-drive and 80GB capacity, some people use SCSI harddrives as where I work, but I think this is overkill and adds €€€.

At the moment we use Compaq dual Xenon processor workstations, not sure of the exact specs, but RAM is an issue with Max I'd go for 2GB on each machine..

Also what type of renders are we talking about, animation? architectural? High quality movies, TV/Film production quality , as these can have an impact on the performance.

Having said that all it really comes down to is time, even on the bare spec machines 3DSmax will work with most models and features, the main difference your going to notice is the time it takes to render a frame from a low-end machine compared to a high end machine.

There is also another option out there called a Pure Render Card, its like 8 Raytracing Processors on PCI card.

Also workflow programs such as Discreet Combustion can help the workflow of working with max as it can reduce the need to do entire re-renders when something changes in a model amongst many other features.

Gavin

Thanks for all the replies folks. I'm swinging towards dell at the moment. With a bit of twiddling, it works out at around €200 more expensive than elara, but means I'm not responsible for borked equipment !

again thanks for the replies, extremely helpful !

Gav

Slutmonkey57b

For a render farm you're going to require SCSI. SATA would do at a pinch but remember it's brand new and still needs the bugs ironing out. RAIDing IDE drives is a waste of time and with a 5400rpm drive and such a high seek time/latency you're going to be wasting your time. Storage Review have a good article up on RAID performance in multi/single user settings (gamers with expensively raided rigs won't like their conclusions though!).

SCSI is expensive but it's the benchmark standard for a reason.

Gavin

Why would I need scsi ? The data is all going to be coming across the network. One machine, that is delivering the content may need a reasonable harddrive, but certainly not all the machines.

Gav

leeroybrown

You could look at www.encom.ie too. They do some good Intel based (official reseller) rackmount servers.

Slutmonkey57b

SCSI is far more reliable, and much faster. The last thing you want in the middle of a 10 hour render is an IDE error fuxxoring everything up. I suppose it depends on how you're organising the sytem - Storagereview.com should have an article somewhere that'll help you out. Or you could have a look at rustboy to see how a single user does it.